 Can I welcome everyone to the 30th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2017, and can I please remind everyone present to turn their mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting? First item of business is a decision on whether to take agendas as item 3 and 4 in private and to also consider whether to take all future reviews of evidence on education reforms in private. Is everyone content that agenda item 3 and 4 are taken in private and all future reviews of evidence on education reforms be taken in private? Next item of business is our first evidence session as part of the early scrutiny of the Scottish Government's proposed education reforms and legislation. The committee is keen to explore the evidence base for the reforms, and today we will hear from a panel of educationalists. Can I welcome Keir Bloomer, convener of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Education Committee, Dr Tracy Burns, senior analyst OECD, Professor Chris Chapman, chair of education policy and practice, Glasgow University and Professor Graham Donaldson. I should mention that Keir is also the chair of the commission on school reform, and thank you all for coming along today. Before I invite questions from other members, I will start with a general question on your views on the proposed reforms. To what extent do the proposed reforms reflect best practice internationally and how applicable is the experience of other countries' education systems to the Scottish context? Would anybody like to begin answering? It is going to be a short meeting today. My perception of the overall package is that, if you take each of the elements individually, you can trace a relationship between what is proposed, where Scotland has been and has learned from past experience, and it is also drawing on experience elsewhere. Within the total reform package, the antecedents of the reform and the evidence base of the reform are quite clearly traceable. My own view is that, within that total package, the challenge will be not so much as to whether or not the structure changes are right or wrong. It will all hinge on the extent to which the nature of the relationships that exist between all the various stakeholders within the process are strong, constructive and positive, and whether we get the leadership right in relation to what happens at the national level, at the new regional collaboratives, and particularly at the headteacher level, because the headteacher's charter places a huge responsibility on our heads across Scotland. One of the tests of that will be the extent to which our headteachers rise to that challenge and the extent to which we are able to have procedures in place that will ensure that, where the problem lies at the school with the headteacher rather than elsewhere, we have mechanisms that identify that well in advance, rather than being reactive to a problem that has emerged. The Royal Society of Edinburgh felt that the Government failed to make the argument in favour of the reforms as strongly as it might have done, either in the original consultation or in the next steps document, which came at the end of the consultation. That is not to say that there are not very good arguments in favour. They just weren't made out in these documents as convincingly as I think it would have been helpful if they had been. We feel that there is considerable evidence that internationally there is a trend in the direction of decentralisation of governance of education systems, although the evidence is not tremendously strong that that is beneficial. There is some evidence that I think Tracy is able to speak to this much better than I am of a connection between decentralisation, devolving control to schools and improvement in standards, but it is not a particularly strong correlation. Like Graeme, I feel that much will depend on the quality of the relationships that subsequently get established and the quality of the leadership that is offered. Professor Chapman, Dr Bonsor. Just really to amplify the points around relationships and to highlight the fact that the direction of travel I think is sound and based on evidence, but there isn't a switch that you can flick. If we look south of the border, for example, you can trace back these types of reforms to the 1988 Education Reform Act and local management of schools. There has been an incremental devolution or empowerment of headteachers over a period of decades. The point that I want to amplify is that this is about relationships and ensuring that we have the right leadership in the right places at the right times. Thank you very much. Dr Bonsor, do you have anything that you would like to add? Just a couple of points. One of the things that resonated with me was that all of the issues that are on the table are really the hardest issues to solve. These are the hardest governance challenges that we see with all the countries we work with. I mean, it's absolutely in line with the issues that we see all of our partners and all of our countries struggling with. So there are no easy answers, as Chris just said, but I do think it's important to point out that the question is not so much, should it be decentralisation or not, it's more of a question of what should be decentralised and what should not be. It's not just a process of giving away everything to a local level, so it's really about the details and making the process work. I'm sure we're going to come into more detail with some of those. Liz, would you like to start with the question? I have to say that this is one of the most challenging but also the most interesting questions that we face. The evidence that we've received from the OECD and also the evidence that we've had through internal Parliament briefings seems to suggest, and I think you said it, Dr Burns in your report, that it shouldn't be about structures, it should be about the process and ensuring that what we adopt is what works. From the international evidence, it seems to suggest that there are a variety of systems that work well. In that spirit, could I ask you whether you think that that in itself is a learning lesson for Scotland that there maybe isn't one single model that is appropriate? My second question would be, to what extent do you think that, as well as a headteacher, leadership and the relationships, accountability is the key word when we are deciding what should and shouldn't be reformed? In our work, accountability is really at the heart of modern governance challenges and getting that right. The three themes that we focused on were accountability, capacity building and strategic thinking. Those came out of discussions with our 35 member countries. They were consistently the issues that were the hardest to get right. I think in terms of takeaway points and what is a learning lesson, I think that there is no one right system is absolutely right. The reason that there is no one right system is because having the right structure is helpful but it's not sufficient. Really being able to plan and create a system that works and that is continuing to be able to adapt and meet the needs of its people is actually the goal. Even if at the end of today or at the end of this reform there is a perfect system that's developed, it will never succeed in permanence to keep doing what it needs to do. It's about creating a system that can evolve and change as the problems evolve and change. I do think that that's a fundamental thing to note because the temptation is usually to focus on the structures in the hope that it's a relatively quick fix and it's concrete. You feel successful when you can do something but it doesn't mean that it's going to change any of the relationships underlying it. That was the point that my colleagues were making at the beginning. Professor Burns, can I tease that out a little bit? That's an interesting answer that you've just given. If it is correct that we have to be flexible on a very complex issue but also to take different lessons from other countries, do you believe that we need to do much more to improve the data set that we have? In terms of educational performance, or do you believe that we can move forward simply by looking at the lines of accountability? I'm going to hedge that answer, mostly because I'm not an expert on Scotland. I don't feel capable of answering precisely about the data set that you have. I would like to iterate, and this is a theme and a trend for all of the OECD countries, that simply having more data available does not mean that it's used. One of the things about compiling and marshalling evidence to make decisions is that that can also be a contested space. People can be very rational also in the use of evidence and they can also choose the evidence that suits their purposes. Being able to have a lot of evidence and a lot of data doesn't necessarily answer the questions. It's really creating a system that is designed to provide the evidence that you need to answer the questions that you have. I know that's a hedge, but I think it's actually a really important point because one of the temptations in many systems has been to just provide more and more data in the belief that that will make things transparent and clear. But if the data isn't used or it's not used appropriately, then it's actually not necessarily helpful to do that. I know that the Royal Society has got quite strong views about the possibility of data in terms of making judgments about Scotland's performance. Yes, we do feel that the quality of evidence that is available in Scotland is insufficient. I think that I'd like to comment also, if I may, on the first question that you asked, which was about the police of structural change. Scotland has not actually gone in for much change in governance for a very long time. I think that there is a tendency in Scotland to underestimate the importance of governance change and structural change. There are a lot of things that are very strong in the Scottish education system. We have a very well qualified and highly skilled teaching profession. There are a lot of policies in place, which I believe to be right, like Curriculum for Excellence, like the report that Graham Donaldson was responsible for on professional development of teachers. And yet the results that Scotland has been obtaining over the past couple of decades have not been particularly impressive. So there is something that means that we are not getting the maximum benefit from the strengths that our system actually possesses. I think that that has to come down to the governance structures that are in place. There has been no really serious attempt to address governance in Scottish education that I am aware of since the Education Act of 1929. So we couldn't really be accused of constant fiddling with the structure. And while I don't think that governance change in itself brings improvement, it does put in place some of the prerequisites for improvement, or to stand that on its head, if there are problems in the way that the system is run, then unless those are addressed, we will not make very much progress whatever the strengths of our policies happen to be. I do agree about the importance of evidence in support of those, which is why the Royal Society, as I said earlier, regretted the fact that the argument in favour of what is now being called a school and teacher-led system was not more strongly advanced in the two papers. There is problem also, of course, at the more local level about schools having the data available in order to enable them to make sound judgments. Now I think that that situation is improving, but there is still a considerable distance to go. Daniel Hamilton It's fair to say that everyone across the Scottish Parliament has used the 2015 OECD paper to sort of slightly suit their own purposes. I think that it's an incredibly useful bit of work, but I was just wanting to explore two of the key themes there. One was that it talked about needing to strengthen the middle, and the other was essentially that there was a watershed moment for curriculum for excellence. Just in terms of that first point, and I know that Tracy Burns wasn't the author of that report, but you are from the OECD, so I might slightly put you on the spot. How would you characterise that requirement to strengthen the middle? Building your previous answers about the relationships, what do we need to do to make sure that middle is strong and focused on improving education in Scotland? I was not the author of that report. My colleague David Estins was one of the main authors, and he had a lot of passion for the work that he put into that report, and he felt very positive about both the Scottish system and the recommendations that the review made. In the context of the general governance discussion about the role of a middle tier more broadly, what we find is the importance of, this comes from a lot of work with the Nordic countries, for example, where power was devolved to the municipal level. In some countries, that could be a municipality of 120 people, and they have the same governance responsibilities as the city of Oslo or the city of Stockholm, for example. That didn't work particularly well and they struggle a lot with particularly reinforcing the capacities of the smaller players to be able to deliver on their mandate. One of the things is trying to think about whether it's a series of networks that work together that help each other and build capacity for some of the smaller players, or whether it's a formal middle tier in a structural sense, which is designed to not only build capacity and help the different players and help learning between the different partners, but also to think about more broadly equity issues. One of the dangers with full devolution is that you have very small players who lack the capacity to deliver, but also who have less resources available to them, so they are less able to deliver even if they had the capacity. The role of that middle layer, whether it's a formal structural body or whether it's a series of networks of players, is both to build capacity and support and to keep the conversation going among all the players, to allow them to learn from each other, but also to ensure equity across the system, to make sure that national objectives and excellence is being met by and can be met by all of the devolved bodies and all of the devolved pieces of the system. I think that that answer is very interesting. The issue at stake here is about capacity at that middle layer. I was just wondering if you or other members of the panel felt that there was sufficient clarity on that. To summarise what we are looking at at the moment of this review, we will have Scottish Government level, there will be an education council, there will be regional improvement collaboratives, there will still be a role for local authorities, there will be school clusters and then there will be school clusters. That's potentially six different layers of competence and layers of locus. I'm just wondering whether or not we are actually potentially creating more complexity rather than reducing it and whether there's over focus on structures rather than that capacity. I'd be interested on any thoughts on that from the panel. I thought that the use of the term middle in the OECD report was unfortunate, because I think that it's led to a kind of discussion of what we mean by the middle rather than focusing on what we actually need to do. I think that what was meant by the middle was that it shouldn't be top down or bottom up. Therefore, middle is a kind of way of saying that we need collaboration. What you need to do is to create a way of bringing about change in a system by which no one bit of the system is the one that's responsible for it, but it needs your collaborative structure. Talking about the middle is where all of that can come together. My own view is that we shouldn't necessarily think of the middle back to the structural question as a tier, which is where you tend to go straight away, but you actually think about the mechanisms by which you can ensure that all of those who have a direct role in ensuring high quality education have the opportunity and the duty to collaborate in order to make that happen. I think that that notion of collaboration is an important part of the process. I think that the notion of the regional collaboratives are not really a tier in the system, they are a mechanism by which you encourage collaboration. To that extent, I don't think that it necessarily should be seen as an additional tier in a structural sense. I don't know whether you want me to talk about the watershed moment, but I could certainly talk about that. That was going to be my next question. If you'd like to talk about the watershed moment, please feel free. I would agree with the OECD report. I think that we are at a watershed moment in terms of curriculum for excellence. I think that Scotland has suffered from being one of the, if not the first country in the field in terms of thinking about the curriculum differently from the way it had been thought about previously. Chris made reference to the 1988 act in England and Wales, which essentially was a coverage curriculum. What it did, and sensibly so, said that at that point, there was a problem of entitlement in terms of young people were not getting the entitlement to the broad and balanced education that they were entitled to, and therefore it defined the curriculum tightly at the centre and set it out in a range of subjects and programmes of study. That was by and large about entitlement. Over time, that has led to a very inflexible and highly crowded curriculum, where, as pressures build up, it tends to get added into the curriculum. We never had the same statutory national curriculum in Scotland, but the same pressures applied and the same evolution, to a certain extent, took place in Scotland, as it did in England. Scotland, in that early period, with the creation of the Parliament and the long-hard look at what we were trying to do with school education, the national debate that took place at that time, came up with quite a different way of thinking about the curriculum. That was that we need to think about young people's experience at school as being, of course, about the learning in relation to the subjects, but it's about more than that, and it's about the extent to which young people themselves are shaped as individuals and people through their experience at school. The four capacities of curriculum for excellence were an attempt to give expression to what kind of young people are going to come out of the school system, ready to thrive in the world that they are going to live in into the next century. Scotland was one of the first countries in the field to start thinking about the curriculum differently from a coverage curriculum. Over time, we have lost a narrative. Over time, we no longer know what curriculum for excellence is, and its fundamentals are. Therefore, what we have are a series of bits of curriculum reform, and we need to recreate and re-emphasise the narrative. That original thinking is of vital importance. We don't know. Deciding what young people do at school is incredibly complex, given the uncertainties of the future world, and therefore building them as people is as important, if not more important, than acquisition of lots of learning. If other members of the panel would agree with that substitution, we need to have a regroup and think about the direction of curriculum for excellence, consolidating what we have done. One of my thoughts is whether or not this governance review is a distraction from that bit of work or, at the very least, not focused enough on that central theme that we need to focus on. I would agree very much with the analysis that you have just been offered by Graham. Both the questions that you asked, the one about the middle and the one about the watershed moment, have in common the problems that we are having with Education Scotland, and the need to do something radically to improve that organisation. We will have in place, very shortly, a new chief inspector, and I wish her well, in tackling the many problems that she is going to face. One of them certainly is that, although the Government accepted the recommendations of the 2015 OECD report, and that involved, of course, a radical simplification, or should have involved a radical simplification of curriculum for excellence, and the massive guidance that has been produced, I do not think that that process has gone far enough, and I do not think that it has yielded the result of real clarity in relation to what the objectives of curriculum for excellence actually are, and the key features that have to be emphasised in order to realise those objectives, which I think is very much what Graham is saying. We need to do much more to take forward the thinking that was in the OECD report in relation to curriculum for excellence. I also interpreted the meaning of the middle in much the same way as he did, not simply as the intermediate tier between schools and central government, but as being much more about collaborations, networks, the whole infrastructure that lies in the middle that enables and supports teachers in doing their job. The Government has clearly decided that the correct way forward for this is regional improvement collaboratives. At the time of the original governance consultation, the Royal Society of Edinburgh did not agree with that, and I do not think that many other people did either. It was not a suggestion that found much resonance with any of the respondents. In the interim, there has been discussion between Government, COSLA, ADS and so forth, which has resulted in a new and superior model of regional improvement collaboratives. I have one serious objection to the way in which that was done, because it seems to me that the difference between the conversations that Government is free to have at any time with any stakeholder and an open public consultation is that the open public consultation gives those who are not generally spoken to the opportunity to have their voices heard. In that case, they will not do so, because, of course, the future shape of the collaboratives is now determined. It has been determined between lead stakeholders and the notion that it is being consulted upon at the moment is, frankly, farcical. Nevertheless, I do welcome the way in which the concept has changed over the ensuing months. However, I think that whether the notion of a collaborative structure of that kind will function effectively depends very much on the future functioning of Education Scotland and, even more than that, on the point that has made incidentally twice in the consultation on the bill, that the performance of the collaboratives will be led by schools and by teachers. They will be organisations that respond to what schools actually want in the way of support. If that is realised in practice, that will be a very substantial step forward, because the major failing of Education Scotland, learning and teaching Scotland and the two predecessors before that was that they were seen, and indeed were, instruments of government policy, not instruments of providing the support that the profession thought that it actually wanted. I just want to let Tavish in now. I think that you want to continue in Education Scotland, but we have another hour here, so can I ask that we keep our answers a bit shorter so that we can get through all the stuff that we have to get through. I just wanted to pursue Keir Bloomer's line of argument with the other panel members because Education Scotland has been responsible for the last 10 years in broad terms, and yet the proposals, as far as I can understand them, augment the powers of Education Scotland. Does the rest of the panel believe that that is the right approach? The original decision to bring together learning and teaching Scotland and the Inspectorate of Education was an attempt, I believe, to try to ensure that the learning that came out of the inspection process was more directly fed into the way in which development took place nationally. I think that that was a very laudable aim. As some members of the committee may be aware, prior to that I was head of the inspectorate, so I am not exactly totally objective in relation to all of this. It would not have been my preference to bring the two bodies together at that time, not what I would have done. What I was trying to do with the inspectorate was to move the inspectorate to a much stronger focus on improvement, so we were using accountability as an agent of improvement. The inspectorate did a lot of work in terms of leadership and so on arising out of the work that it did. That is now water under the bridge. The decision was taken by the two bodies that were brought together. I think that the challenge now facing Education Scotland is to convincingly create the appropriate Chinese walls inside the organisation that preserve the independence of inspections. The inspection is not simply seen as the enforcement arm of the development side of the organisation, which is sometimes how it is characterised, but can genuinely provide evidence to the system more generally to all of us who are engaged. Having the good of Scottish education at heart can provide independent evidence that allows us to make judgments about how well things are progressing, which are sufficiently independent of credibility in relation to those judgments. I do not think that that is impossible within the notion of an education Scotland. I do not think that it is what happened in the period immediately prior to that. How you could possibly be both the chief inspector of schools and also the chief executive of Education Scotland, and how you could possibly have a Chinese wall between the two roles that you hold as an individual? I think that that is one of the governance issues. The director of inspection within Education Scotland needs to have a degree of their own integrity and independence within that structure, which is then fed into the chief inspector. That is transparent, so it does not happen in a way that is simply behind closed doors. I think that if that process happens with an expectation that the results of inspection, not simply school inspections but the more thematic work that the inspector does has transparency in terms of how it goes about its business. Given that you have a combined structure, I do not think that it is impossible to create something that would satisfy the requirements of independence, but that will not be easy. Part of it will be about perception. It is not so much necessarily whether you can do it or not, it is whether people perceive that it is working well. That would be a real challenge for the new chief inspector. Dr Burns, I wonder if I could ask you internationally just on this point that Professor Donaldson is making about the split between inspection on one hand and policy on the other in terms of what we are discussing. What is your international experience? Presum that there are both models in good education systems around the world? I think that the real takeaway is to have a conversation and perhaps you have already had this about what the goals of the system are in terms of outcomes. A lot of this discussion is predicated on increasing outcomes or improving the system. One basic question is what does that mean? The inspector's job is to think about the functioning of schools. Part of that is to have a discussion and a serious thought about what elements of performance are they interested in tracking and monitoring. That is fundamental to what we think of in terms of what we want out of an education system. In that case, I do not know enough about the current proposal. What I would say is that the model of success can be successful both ways, but it is important to get the mixture right. The way that Graham has spelt it out, I would agree with. It is incredibly important to balance that correctly. Richard, do you want to come in briefly and then that is all of it? I do not know if it is on this theme, but I just want to ask a general question, listening to what has been said so far. Clearly, as you perhaps expect with any debate over governance, there is a very academic flavour to your contributions to this committee. I just want to bring it back to real-life impact in the classroom and ask you in terms of the debate over governance and some of the themes that we have been discussing so far. What is your view briefly on what the actual impact will be on teachers in the classroom environment, given that one of the big themes of Scottish education is teacher workload, and while we debate legislation in this place and will do our best to make sure that it is the best legislation possible, ultimately we have to think about the impact in the classroom. The point takes us back to the OECD report. I would just like to start off by reiterating the call for more evidence in the system. I think it is laudable that we are drawing on a vast international evidence base, but it was clear in the OECD report that there was a call for a stronger Scottish empirical evidence base and a stronger involvement of our universities. I think that we have made some progress since 2015. We have a research strategy. We have the newly formed Scottish Council of Deans of Education, who has been working collaboratively with Government in drawing up proposals to take forward a programme of research. I think that that will be key if we are to understand the complexity and nuances of the realities of teachers' lives in their classrooms. I do not think that we should take the realities of practice in a detached, isolated way away from creating and developing a robust Scottish evidence base. That is the first point, and it does come back to the OECD report. The second point, I just wanted to pick up on the strengthening of the middle. I concur with colleagues around the table, but I think that this also plays into the Education Scotland debate in a way because it is really about balancing accountability mechanisms and improvement. Historically, what systems have had around the world is a relatively bureaucratic set of organisations set within hierarchical cultures, and what we are trying to do is break down those vertical bureaucracies and create much more strength in those lateral ties and networks. That has implications for accountability, and I would like us to be using the word responsibility more than accountability in a debate. Professionals being responsible to one another for their performance rather than accountable to somebody somewhere for their performance. I think that if we can use the regional improvement collaboratives as a mechanism and a set of arrangements and processes that support the movement of our staff around the system so they gain different experiences and different insights into how the system works, we have a much more realistic chance of these reforms being successful. Because they will have insights and will have built the capacity through a different set of experiences compared to traditional career progressions. For me it is about creating more flexibility in the system and seeing the regional improvement collaboratives as something that is much more fluid rather than another set of bureaucratic arrangements that sit within the middle in a hierarchy somewhere. The final point that I think the OECD brought up in 2015, which was really important, was about what links in and it was about moving from a century managed system and placing innovation much closer to the classroom. For me it is about empowering schools and headteachers and teachers to be able to make decisions at the learning level. In order to do that successfully we need to create a culture where we are not so scared of failure and that people are encouraged to take risks. That is very well and the system will improve as long as we combine that with monitoring the impact of those changes to practice that teachers are making in classrooms so we know what is working and improving practice and what isn't rather than doing it on a whim and a hearsay. I was really just to say that if I was a teacher and I was quite busy in my classroom wanting a rest at the end of the day and I was watching this debate I would be thinking what does this mean for my everyday job so the governance changes you support. Is there any example that can give me what that will mean to the everyday experience of a teacher in the classroom? Having been a teacher in one of those classrooms in a very challenging school I can tell you absolutely what it means for practice. It means actually placing students at the front of everything you do rather than being caught up in some of the peripheral activity. It means not only placing students at the forefront of what you do, it means working with and learning from your colleagues in other classrooms around the school, in other schools locally and also beyond. This cannot be a bolt on. This has to be a fundamental rethinking of the way that we work and the way that we view our professional lives and our contribution. If it does end up as a bolt on then there is a danger that we are just adding without taking away to the complexity of teachers' lives. As I said, what we need is for teachers to be understanding how they can have the most impact on the lives of their children by working with colleagues and taking responsibility for the outcomes of children, not just within their classroom or their school but also in neighbouring schools around the system. We have this sense of collective responsibility which I think is key for us moving forward. I have a lot of sympathy with the import of your question because I think that it is important that we look from the classroom up rather than from the outside in terms of the reform. From the point of view of a teacher, a classic response would be that it depends whether that will make a big difference to the capacity of the teacher to do the kind of job that they want to do with their young people. I think that if we do move to a situation, as Chris has described, where more space is created for teachers to work together in relation to arriving approaches to learning and teaching that are going to really make a difference for their kids, I think that if the teachers are supported more in terms of their own professional learning, I think that that will still work in progress. We still have quite a long way to go to create the framework within which we have a teaching profession that is properly supported in terms of growing as a profession. The most significant bit is that we need to get the accountability mechanism right because the risk—Tracy will recognise that internationally—is that we create a structure within which the rhetoric is about freedom. The rhetoric is about greater ownership of the system, but the reality is that you are free to do what the accountability system tells you to do. You are not actually free at all, you are simply responding to the pressures that come from the accountability system. I think that getting, being very clear about how we establish a constructive approach to accountability that reinforces the good things that are happening in our schools and affirms those good things that are happening in our schools and works with the profession in order to bring about improvement, as well as identifying those relatively small number occasions when things are not going well. Workload becomes an issue when you do not believe in what you are doing, because you simply have to feed the machine. A lot of teachers' complaints about workload are because they feel a sense of alienation from what it is that they are being asked to do and the way in which the accountability system is impacting on them. The way in which we will get a much more vibrant classroom experience for young people is to be very clear about the relationship between backing the profession and getting the accountability mechanism constructive rather than one that is intrusive. I am going to move on and you can come back in later today Oliver. Thank you convener, it is pretty much picking up on all the points that we have heard already. I am interested to go back to the issue around relationships, because I get the sense from teachers I speak to that there is a breakdown in trust in the system already. There are a number of people who have not bought into the curriculum for excellence reform or certainly have very serious questions about it. We hear the issue around teacher workload, lack of meaningful consultation on some of the new proposed reforms. When a major partner in the reform process feels like that, how is it ever going to be possible to build a shared sense of ownership over this round of reforms? I am not sure that I agree with you in terms of teachers' views about curriculum for excellence. Over the course of the past two or three months, I have done quite a lot of work with the groups of teachers across Scotland. One of the questions that I ask at the outset is whether they still believe in curriculum for excellence and given the opportunity to discuss that and then to vote on it. Overwhelmingly, the belief is still there that curriculum for excellence is the right thing for Scottish school children and for Scottish education. The follow-up question is, do you know what curriculum for excellence actually is and what can across the air is more confusion about what we are actually talking about. Going back to the response to the earlier question, I do not think that curriculum for excellence, which becomes a kind of label, is the problem. I think that it is recapturing the huge enthusiasm that was around across Scottish teachers about 10 years ago for what curriculum for excellence was trying to do. We need to recapture that and re-energise the profession and support of curriculum for excellence. I think that the huge goodwill is still there towards it if we get that right. In my view, there is no lack of consultation. What there is is a lack of evidence of consultation making any difference. I think that the profession and everybody else becomes steadily disillusioned by circumstances in which a proposal is put forward, is severely criticised and yet goes forward in a virtually unaltered form. I do not exactly agree with your form of words, but I suspect that I agree with the intent behind them. There is, in that sense, something of a breakdown of trust. Teachers do indeed still believe in curriculum for excellence, but they lack clarity about what curriculum for excellence entails. There has been a significant shift in the way in which Government portrays its priorities. We hear very little now about curriculum for excellence. We hear a lot about the national improvement framework and particularly about the first two priorities in the national improvement framework, which are raising standards for all and closing the gap. There is nothing incompatible between those two priorities on the one hand and implementation of curriculum for excellence as originally conceived on the other, but I think that that link has not been made sufficiently strongly at the present moment. If the Government still adheres to the original philosophy of curriculum for excellence, it needs to re-emphasise that that is the way forward and the way in which the two main priorities of the national improvement framework can be realised. Ross, would you like to go on to your next question? First question follows on very much from Richard Lochhead's line of questioning. I am still not convinced that the Government has its priorities right here. I welcome that education seems to be the flagship domestic policy issue for them. My question is why Government reforms are their priority, looking at the evidence of where the issues are in Scottish education. Governance is far from perfect, but to me it does not seem as if the evidence leads you to the conclusion that, for example, regional bodies should be one of our top priorities. Professor Chapman mentioned, for example, the desire for teachers to collaborate more on how that improves education outcomes. Absolutely. If you look at the responses to the consultation, the responses from teachers were quite overwhelmingly clear when they said that their barrier to greater collaboration is not a structural barrier, it is resources, it is the result of budget cuts, it is the result of a decade of austerity. My question would be, is governance reform the right priority when we have not resolved what seems to be what the workforce is saying is a far greater issue, the financial and budgetary constraints as a result of the last 10 years? Anybody would like to take that one on? I do not think that that is a neither-or. I do not think that it is either governance or finance. Obviously, we have lived through a period where increasingly the public pound has to be spent very parsimoniously, and we have really not been in a situation where in the past we have probably been more able to lubricate change through resources, and that is much more difficult in the world that we are currently living in. Therefore, one of the ways in which you can get more out of the resources that you have got is through collaboration. It is the ability of teachers to work together. The whole is great on the sum of the parts, so you get more from that. That is one way of addressing some of the difficulties that are around. I do think that that does lead to decisions having to be taken about how we create the space within schools in order for teachers to engage in that kind of collaboration. Part of the decisions that are taken by headteachers might lead to some quite hard decisions about, for example, class sizes or the nature of choice in the curriculum, because both of those impact on the extent of time that teachers are in front of classes. It is important that we do not define productivity in teaching as being the amount of time that teachers spend in front of a class. Productivity is to do with the quality of what happens when teachers are in front of a class, and we have not invested nearly enough in helping teachers to be able to do as good a job as possible. We have seen simply having them fulfil their contractual requirements as they currently exist as being the measure of how we are using the resource well. I think that we need to be prepared to take some harder decisions about how we create that space. If there is more money, that would be great, but if there isn't, then we have to think about different ways in which we can do that. Just to follow up on that a little bit, I think that one of the principles of thinking about governance is really trying to understand the whole system and taking a whole system approach. One of the reasons why that is really important is to avoid a bit-by-bit way of dealing with it. It was talking about the curriculum earlier, Graham's observation, that you end up with a lot of pieces, but the whole thing doesn't necessarily hold together. I think this part of the process and actually having a vision for the system is really crucial to be able to have all the pieces aligned, because if you focus on one piece and you don't align it to the rest of the system, then that piece may improve for a particular moment in time, but it's not going to necessarily have long-standing change. In terms of building the momentum and the critical mass bore change, there does actually need to be a real step back to think of how all these pieces connect. It hasn't come up yet, but one of the things that I thought was quite interesting is this way of thinking about teacher pathways and different roles and specialities for teachers. Thinking about that as a way to retain the best and attract highly motivated teachers to the profession that's absolutely in line with international evidence, but it's also connected to all the accountability frameworks and all the potential for collaboration and expertise. All of those pieces actually need to fit together. I would argue quite strongly that it's not a distraction at all. It's a necessary precondition for having a system that works. Professor Charlton, you wanted to go. We've spoken a lot about collaboration. Collaboration doesn't happen by accident. There has to be an architecture in place to support the collaboration. For me, the fundamental issue is about how you lead and build the leadership capacity in order to make that collaboration effective and purposeful. We see that if you look at the research evidence that in terms of impact on student outcomes, the leadership practice that gives twice the effect size of any other practice is the investment in professional learning. Therefore, we must be investing in our teachers and our leaders' professional learning to a level that we've never invested before. That goes back to the point about building different pathways and having a coherent pipeline of both teacher development and leadership development within the system. I think that we are at a really important moment when we could put the pieces of the jigsaw in the right places through the governance review and the associated set of reforms, but the key, of course, will be an implementation. How those things play out in practice remain to be seen, but I think that the direction of travel is the right one, is based in evidence, but it requires us having the strongest possible leadership in the right places at the right time. I'm sure everyone in the room would like to see Scottish education better resourced than it is at the present moment, but I do not see that as the most significant problem that we are facing. In all circumstances, what you do with the money is more important than the amount of the money that you've got. Scottish school education suffers from excessive bureaucracy, unhelpful over-accountability, recurrent workload problems, inadequate policy implementation. Those are all, at base, governance problems. We have got to get the governance infrastructure right. Had I had the chance to answer Richard Lochhead's question, I would have said very briefly that getting decisions taken nearer to where they have their impact has got to be a good thing, and it has the potential to reduce workload if we have less permission seeking and reporting back. I say that it has the potential to do that. It's not inevitable that that will be the effect, because we may be lacking in courage in letting go of the system when we devolve decision making. However, I think that the direction of travel is right, and I think that the emphasis on governance is right too. Do I have time for one follow-up on this, convener, or would you like me to move on to the next? Could you move on to the next one? I'm a bit worried about time, Ross. I appreciate it, thanks. Doctor Burns, one of the areas where there's been a lot of focus and a lot of emphasis from the Government is on greater parental involvement in the system. The area that I'm interested in is great involvement from the children and young people themselves. I was wondering if you had any examples from elsewhere where greater people involvement in co-design of the curriculum, in governance, in school level governance and on, whether it is, municipal or greater levels, where that has helped to improve not just outcomes but buy-in from those who are being educated. This is something that I'll give you an example from Flanders, because this is something that they're currently working on right now. Because of the structure of their system, they have a highly iterative process for policymaking and a highly participatory process. They struggle a little bit with getting that right, but one of the things that they've really tried to do is build the voice of the students and the voice of the parents. From their perspective and from research evidence, it's very clear that being able to be part of the process increases your feeling of responsibility and ownership if your voice is heard. Being part of the process, but then as an exercise where you just tick a box, has the opposite effect. It's a very positive way forward, but it has to be done well to navigate this balance between hearing the voices of the people around the table, but sometimes you also need to take very difficult decisions, and not everybody is going to be in agreement with that decision. One of the things to get right is to be very clear about who's involved, why they're involved, but also at the end of the day who is responsible for making really tough choices. It might be that that group of people might change depending on the circumstance, but it needs to be very clear, because the one thing that is clear from the Flemish experience is that if you involve students but if it's perceived by the students as an empty exercise, then it backfires. Just as a brief general follow up to that, what then does greater pupil participation look like under the current direction of travel for reform in Scotland? What would greater pupil participation be? That operates at different levels. I think that we already have quite a number of examples of pupil engagement in partly how they're learning and also what they're learning in different schools inside Scotland. There are examples, and certainly I'm currently doing some work down in Wales, and there are examples down there that I'm seeing of young people's engagement. I'm actually working with the Children's Commissioner down there to try and increase the level of young people's engagement in the process. We have here in Scotland a number of mechanisms by which young people at the local and national level can have a voice. My own view would be that the need is for us to use the existing structures more to engage young people directly in the process. They're the ones that are going to affect at the end of the day, and I do think that we've been remiss in the past in not engaging more directly with young people. I think that we have the mechanisms to do it. We just need to use them better. I think that there are some examples of excellent practice that are occurring in Scotland. The part of the challenge that we have is capturing those in a systematic way, which goes back to my previous point about research evidence. We should be investing in case studies of this type of practice so that we can inform other parts of the system and move this excellent practice around. One of the best schools in my area that I go to are ones that involve pupils in the learning of younger pupils, particularly the ones that have the partnerships with senior school pupils going into primary schools and assisting with the learning there. Do you think that there's a scope in what we're doing here to take that and widen that out better? I think that there's some schools that may be nervous of doing that. In fact, it's very good for the development of young pupils both at the younger stage and the senior stage. I think that there's a really interesting example of an evidence-based practice where cross-age tutoring does improve outcomes in both the tutor and the mentee. There's quite a long history and tradition of working in that way. That's exactly the sort of practice that I think we should be celebrating, documenting and moving around the system. Absolutely. One of the questions that I'm interested in is this argument around school autonomy. I would hold my hands up as somebody who's a school teacher for 20 years. You can see what the challenge is, and that would be. What seems to happen is that there's an interchangeability between school autonomy and head teachers autonomy. I wonder if there is a difference to that. I worry that if we have an education model that's based on Mr Chipp's view of a teacher, that he has somebody who's very charismatic, that there are excellent examples of head teachers who have done that in Glasgow simply by the sheer force of their personality and putting structures in place around that, have changed schools. As someone who wasn't Mr Chipp's, I understood that to be a good teacher is about getting systems in place that work. How do we protect the system at school level if what we're doing is handing over authority to the head teacher and therefore at the mercy of that person's view of the world? I wonder how you talked earlier about pupil entitlement. There is a question about already schools gatekeeping, so parents with a child with a disability. Over many years, campaign groups have fought for the right to have mainstream education in sports in place, or for young people it's not simply to be moved out of the system when they're causing problems. What would be the protections at a local level in that regard if at the same time it's all about the school and the head teacher? I absolutely agree with the thrust of the question that you're asking. I do think that this does come back to the way in which we invest in ensuring that what we've got is an approach to leadership in our head teachers, which is not governed by pleasing external forces but by trying to create the conditions inside a school that make a school successful. I think that Scottish College of Educational Leadership has been doing some very good work on a much broader view of leadership than has been the traditional case of thinking about a head teacher. I think that the whole focus on teacher leadership and on distributive leadership is on seeing a school as a community, which is not simply operating at the will of the person at the top, but in exactly the same way as we're moving away from a top-down approach at a national level within schools. We need to develop the same kind of collaborative and participative culture in terms of shaping the nature of what happens inside a school. We have a lot of evidence emerging about teacher leadership, about the role of distributive leadership, about the ways in which head teachers can create the architecture that allows the kind of initiative to take place at classroom level. We don't simply create a new top. Instead of the top being outside the school, the top is the head and everything just has to flow from what the head does. I think that that will be one of the important aspects of making the new system work. A head teacher's charter is a charter for head teachers to be good at the process of creating the right kind of schools that allow our teachers to do a good job. That's an important development in leadership and we have lots of evidence and good practice in Scotland about that happening. You've made reference that I've been to schools in Glasgow where you already see that happening. If the school view is that we're not going to restrict the curriculum, we're not going to offer the same number of subjects that you might get at a high school down the road, you're going to actively have a discipline system that moves children out of the school. It works. The school community agrees with that. They think that that's the right thing to do, but it's not necessarily right for the individuals within it. Are we arguing, for example, that one of the papers mentions a board of governors that governs in accountability at a school level? I think that what troubles me is that we've got a contradiction in policy, which is that we're devolving to the schools but we're centralising out from local authorities. Ultimately, is it a danger that you can't let go completely as Keir Bloomer suggests and therefore there has to be accountability at that level, or that you're weakening the capacity at a local level to influence or shape what's been done at a national level or to be a ballast against it? What are the protections that need to get put in place? Part of your question is what do you do if a headteacher restricts the curriculum? Another version of that question would be what do you do if the local authority restricts the curriculum as a whole number of local authorities did in relation to the number of examinable subjects that young people could do in S4? The answer to the question is absolutely nothing. Nobody did anything about it and the curriculum was restricted as a result. This is certainly a problem that could exist at school level. The answer to it lies very much in the quality of leadership and in cultivating the leadership skills that are necessary to run schools in the kind of way that we would want to see them. Schools are complex organisations and they are systems and they have to be dealt with as systems. Dealing with complexity, dealing with unintended consequences is all part of the apparatus that you need in order to lead that kind of complex organisation. There is quite a lot in Tracy's paper that deals with this particular subject. I think that we have made a lot of progress in relation to headteacher development in recent years. What we have to be careful about is that it is genuinely leadership development and not followership development, which actually in the past it often has been. It is about how you as a headteacher can more effectively implement policies devised out with the school on your behalf. I think that we have moved beyond that now. I think that the kind of things that Graham was saying are absolutely right. I am sorry that the Scottish College for Educational Leadership, having done a very good job, is now simply to be absorbed into an education Scotland, which is as yet unreformed. It seems to me a pity that it was not allowed to continue with the good work that it was doing. It was certainly taking us in the direction of cultivating the kind of school leadership that would be required in order to operate schools effectively in a more autonomous setting. I would have in return is that we seem to be failing to recruit headteachers now. The local school in my area now has a headteacher who is responsible for two secondary schools, maybe more than that at some point. I think that there is a contradiction between us presumably defining this role better and recognising its role and its people's response to it, which has been either not to apply or not to the level that is expected. I am not sure. On the question of restricting the curriculum at a local authority level, I agree with that as well. I am not quite sure how we will go with that. I think that that goes back to resources. Schools and local authorities have made choices around those questions as a consequence of resources. My last question to you is, will the system work effectively with the reasonable amount of resource? Can it really work in a system where you have not enough people in the school to deliver it, for example, or have enough support round about the school to be delivered? Clearly, that is critical. There is a minimal level of resource that is required in order for a school to work well. Some of the evidence from the OECD work is that there is not a correlation between how much a country spends on its education and the quality of that education. The risk is that what we do is simply maintain our existing practices and then try to somehow or other work in the new ones. We have to think quite hard about some of the decisions that need to be taken in order to ensure that we really are creating the kind of high quality learning that young people need and deserve. The panel this morning made much rightly of effectively continuous professional development for teachers and the importance of, I suppose, learning in leadership. Many teachers, many heads in my part of the world, and indeed across Scotland teach. I can think of primary schools, and you have not mentioned the difference between primaries and secondary schools, although it is in the RSE paper, but there are plenty of primary school teachers in my part, a rural part of Scotland, where they are four days a week in class. When are they going to find time to do all these other things? Or maybe I should put that question in a rather better way, which is, will these proposals be adaptable to allow that to happen? Otherwise, I can see how you can teach the head teacher of Anderson High School, who has a thousand kids. Give her more time for the things that you are describing. I am not so sure about the Cullingsborough Primary School. Won't you teach us four days a week? The importance of context and that any set of reforms have to be presented in terms of frameworks and principles, so that there is local responsiveness and adaptability, so that they can be interpreted and implemented within, you know, the rural context of a small primary school or a large urban secondary school. I think we are not arguing for a one-size-fits-all model of educational reform here. I think we are arguing for something that is very nuanced and adapted to local context, so I sort of agree with your statement. Sorry, on you go. You raised an important issue that the Royal Society of Edinburgh is indeed concerned about, as you say, and that is the very differing management capacities of secondary schools and primary schools. I have observed over many years that policymaking in Scottish education is very often dictated by what secondary schools desire. Primary schools find themselves as a kind of afterthought. Not enough consideration has yet been given as to how primary schools will be enabled to take on the kind of responsibilities that the Government wishes them, I think rightly, to take on. There is no reason in principle, of course, why primary schools should not enjoy the same kind of delegated powers as secondary schools can, but there is a need to build capacity. Our view is that the best way of doing that is probably through clusters. There are no doubt other possibilities, but before that becomes legislation, it is important that that particular issue gets the consideration that it deserves. I wanted to follow up. I am hearing a lot of the same things, but there is some very clear evidence of the danger of taking the wrong path, if you will. I think that both Chile and Sweden give very clear examples of what happens if you devolve too quickly and too suddenly without providing the support that is needed at the local level. This is partially on an individual context level, but it is also about equity in the system. This is a fundamental element that needs to be got right. It is incredibly important to get that right because we have many examples of what happens when you do not get it right. The other thing is on funding and to share with you that there is work that has just been released in the most recent education at a glance at the OECD that looks at the functioning of the system. Graham is quite right that there is a correlation to the amount spent in performance, but only up to a certain threshold of which all the OECD countries are passed. Once you have passed that threshold, there is no real correlation between the amount spent and the actual outcome. It is how you actually choose to spend it in that space. There is a new piece of work that has just been released that looks at different systems in the trade-offs that they have made. Some systems choose to save money by having bigger classes, for example Japan and Korea. Others choose to focus more on spending money to support teachers, but then they have less time spent outside of the classroom. Those are some of the traditional policy trade-offs that we have mapped along with performance as measured by PISA. That could be helpful to consider in the future as well. The previous witnesses to the committee, Frank Lennon, experienced a former headteacher. He made the point very strongly that increasing autonomy for headteachers should not be an end in itself. It is a means to take decisions and to pick up the point that Keir Bloomer raised earlier. It is about putting the decision closer to where it matters. Professor Donaldson, in that context, what would you like to see in the headteacher's charter to ensure that that leadership is top class but also gives the headteachers who are going to have to take these or more autonomous decisions the confidence and the accountability in order to move forward? I think that there are two dimensions that partly goes back to what the concern that Johann Lamont was raising. We talked earlier about whether or not we have the story right in terms of what it is that we are trying to achieve in Scottish education, the strategic direction right. One of the corollaries to the headteachers charter is to be very clear about what the strategic expectations are of a school. That could relate to issues to do with the breadth of the curriculum. That could be something that is a duty that is laid on a school at a national level without prescribing in detail the specifics of how that should operate. Beyond that, you can then use the inspection process to engage with the schools as to weigh in which that duty has been taken forward in that school. There is something about strategic direction where we need to think more clearly about the context within which headteacher autonomy is going to be set. It is not a thousand flowers blooming do what you like. It operates within some very clear expectations about the nature of what it is that is expected. In that sense, that relates to the kind of accountability structures that we put in place that allow us to engage with how well headteachers are discharging the duties that are laid on them through national legislation and working together. What we need to be careful about is that what we do not do is put in place a very rigid accountability structure, which then becomes the way in which headteacher behaviour is driven by accountability instead of being driven by what happens inside the school. The bit in the middle is absolutely right. It is a real frustration, I think, for a head that the kind of things that they would like to do and decisions that they would like to take in order to create a better context for learning, they find it very hard to take at the moment. I absolutely agree with the principle of the headteachers charter. I think that it has got to be buttressed at either end with clear or strategic direction about the duties that that goes with that, responsibility that goes with that and an accountability system that engages with that in a constructive way that relates to those duties. My final point is exactly what Frank Lennon said to us. To go a bit further on that, do you fear that if we accept that greater autonomy and slightly different lines of accountability within different schools and local authorities, do you fear that that might be a system that is too diverse? There's a risk that if we don't get this right, if what you get is a very atomised education system that is too diverse, that's not inevitable. I think that that does depend on the way in which we take it forward. I think that the benefit of giving headteachers more scope to be able to shape the nature of the school that they work in, as I say when we talk about headteachers, I'm talking about the school community, which the heads are orchestrating more shape. I think that that has the best chance of creating the kind of context where youngsters will get a higher quality education than they are currently getting, but I do think that it needs to be buttressed at either end. I'm very interested in international comparisons, particularly Ms Burns, around where other countries have done something that's maybe been proposed in our governance review, particularly around regional collaborations and partnerships and cluster work. I'd like to ask you what examples you might have where that has been successful, why it's been successful, what they've done to make it successful, because I think that we're at the start of this where we really need to look elsewhere to see good practice and adopt it. I can give you two examples. One, I would say—I'll preface this by saying that they're examples of success in my opinion, but when you talk to the countries, they can be quite self-critical about whether or not they've achieved their goals. From my opinion, Norway has done a very good job of thinking and instituting processes, so it's not—to go back to our discussion about a middle tier, it's not a structural thing. It's actually a series of partnerships, peer learning networks that work together on a collaborative way to try and really provide the kinds of support and the kinds of guidance that would be needed by locally autonomous schools and heads of schools. That is an example for me of a very positive way for, in this case, a national government just simply giving the empowerment and the support that's needed and being responsive to the requests from the field for the time and place and manner of that support, and just sort of giving the tools over to these constantly evolving networks and partnerships. There's a lot of peer learning that goes on. That, for me, is a really promising example of using a lot of the processes to further this kind of debate and this kind of devolution of responsibilities. Another example, I would say, comes from a more structural approach, which is currently under way in Chile, which is really trying to—they are formally establishing regional bodies to administrate the work. They had full devolution and they are actually now re-centralising in some ways, and they are actually creating regional, I think, six or eleven at the last count, regional bodies, which have formal administrative power to help guide and govern the systems that are still—there's a lot of devolved power, but some of the equity issues and some of the making sure that outcomes are met are actually now responsibilities of that middle level. So that's an example of a structural solution, and then there's the example of the more process-driven solution, and I think both of them work well. And the guiding goal and the challenge for both of them is ensuring equity across the system, because the real danger with this sort of let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach is that you have those who will continue to do well and continue to excel and those that fall behind, the dangers that they will fall even further behind because they simply don't have the support that they need to deliver on what they're expected to do. Pre-emptied in my next line of questioning around them, how do we ensure equity across all schools involved in a regional partnership? Obviously, some schools have got different challenges by the very nature of maybe the area that they serve. How do we ensure that we have that equity across all schools? I can just give you a couple. I mean, this is the crucial question that the most devolved systems are struggling with here. I'd say the Netherlands and Flanders in particular. The need, and in some cases there is a discussion about re-centralising some aspects, but I wouldn't say that it's structural. I think part of it is in Flanders they call it a guiding coalition. So it's not a top-down governance issue. It's about getting the players and the leaders from all different places of the system to come together to pitch a vision for the system, and those objectives are the ones that are then played out. So there's a legitimacy and an ownership of the players in the system to respond to that. So it's being responsive to national objectives because that's crucial. You can't lose sight of that. You can't just have one objective for one group of people and another objective for another. But I guess the question comes down to who establishes those objectives and who is actually setting the vision and the strategy for the system. And in both the Netherlands and in Flanders that's actually a group of, it's not just the government, it's really a group of powerful players whose voices are heard and they work on this together. And I think that they have found it useful for buy-in across the system, but also if you have very different approaches to getting to meet your objectives, but everyone's agreed that this is the objective you want to meet. It's a very different conversation than saying you're not meeting this objective that we've set for you because then the player doesn't consider it legitimate. So it's really about placing legitimacy and dialogue at the centre of the process. One of the challenges we've got is a very changing workplace, very changing challenges around skills. So we have to have flexibility around the provision of the type of education that we do. There's room within those frameworks for adaptability around maybe perpetetic teachers, visiting specialists and how do we ensure that if we need that flexibility that it's not cut off at the knees by maybe for example a local authority deciding to cut the provision around visiting specialists, given that everything's going down to that level. Is there anyone who wants to jump in on that? It's extremely difficult to anticipate what might happen. You can create worst case scenarios, but what we need to do is to put in place a mechanism that will try to ensure that we do create equity in the system. Things like the pupil equity fund and so on are all part of a process of trying to even out the issues that go between schools. So I mean I think, as Tracy says, this is difficult if you move to a system where there is much greater local autonomy than you have to put in place other mechanisms that try to ensure that what you don't do is just widen the gap in that process. I think that that will be one of the questions for the regional collaboratives, because at that level it allows that kind of varied support to be put in place, not just within particularly some of the smaller authorities but operating more generally. I think that there is such a focus on equity in Scottish education just now that my hope would be that that will drive good behaviours in this direction rather than behaviours that might widen the gap. To find a question on regional collaboratives, do you see the regional collaboratives working in a way that might be able to address issues around teacher recruitment and ensuring that all local authority or schools are not fighting against one another in order to recruit teachers? I think that regional collaboratives provide an opportunity to provide teachers with different types of experiences in different contexts and build their professional expertise by orchestrating the movement of the workforce around an area that is greater than local authority. A by-product of that might be that you can begin to think about how you co-ordinate the workforce over a bigger region. I think that there is the potential for that, but probably as a by-product rather than as a primary objective. I think that one of the possible benefits from all of this, if it really works well, is that what we do is to create a much more attractive teaching profession and a much more attractive education system. Just now, Joanne Lamont earlier talked about the difficulty in recruiting head teachers. I would hope that, as we move forward, instead of head teachers seeing the job as one where you get a bit of extra money but you get all the flack that comes your way, you actually have a much more creative role inside a school than some perceived to be the case at the moment, and similarly with teachers. I think that if we create a context where we are building the teaching profession and building the confidence and capacity of the profession, that the schools are vibrant places, many of them are just now, but more vibrant places than they are just now, I think that that is part of how you combat the perception that teaching is a difficult job that is not as well paid as it might be and therefore we get a problem to do with recruitment. My hope would be that this will help us to make a much more attraction towards being part of that, of what I hope would be an exciting Scottish education system. I can ask one supplementary question. On the point that Liz Smith was pursuing with Professor Dawson about accountability of head teachers, is it possible to define who they will actually be accountable to once this exercise has concluded? Is it me as a parent or is it who? I think that there will be multiple accountabilities in the process. I think that that is an inevitability arising from this and part of it will have to be to do with transparency, so the nature of what is happening inside a school is one that is very transparent and then those multiple accountabilities can operate in relation to that. I think that the inspection process as it moves forward will have an important part to play in helping to create that or support that transparency but there are quite big changes needed for that to happen. Is it possible to discover who head teachers are accountable to by reading the consultation on the bill? The answer is no. There is a great deal in that document which is extraordinarily confused and confusing. I have said already that I think that its direction of travel is broadly correct but there is a great deal of work requiring to be done if we are going to get a coherent piece of legislation out of it which results in a system where responsibilities and accountabilities are clear because they certainly are not at the present moment. I would like to ask about national priorities. We received a paper from SPICE which effectively told us about international comparisons and unfortunately for us as politicians there was no silver bullet there to be able to say that that is the system to go forward. That probably means that it is horses for courses, it is basically each nation to their own ideal and what they want to do. We have the national improvement plan and we have the regional collaboratives. Do you see the process that the Scottish Government has proposed as a good way that we will be able to get the national improvement framework and work with the regional bases to try to make sure that it does what it is meant to do and also at a local level as well? Do you think that the framework is there and if not then how do we go about making sure that we do that? I think that the framework is just a mechanism. The framework will not inspire people or result in itself in anything happening in schools that are dramatically... I think that the challenge will be and you made the point earlier that there is no magic bullet, there is nothing we can take and just policy borrow from wherever it is that we can put into it. The structure has to be true to Scottish culture and Scottish education. It has to work with the people that we have. I am quite optimistic that this can work but there are huge risks in the process and we really need to go into this while our eyes open and be prepared to take some very hard decisions as it moves forward. I was more interested in what, based on this, it was Keir Bloomer that brought up the fact that part of the framework is the attainment gap and closing the attainment gap in particular. I was interested in one of the things that you said, Keir, about the fact that it is not so much the money, it is how you use the money and one of the things that you in your paper or the Royal Society have done has mentioned that SIMD is not necessarily the best way to go forward. I have been in this committee in its various guises over the years to know that I am aware of its faults but what other ways have we got to try and get the right money into the right place at the right time? Do you have any ideas on that one as well? Of course, the pupil equity fund did not use SIMD as a way of allocating the money, it used free school meal entitlement. Free school meal entitlement has drawbacks because not everybody who is entitled takes up the free meal. Nowadays, at the lower end of primary school in many cases, it is impossible to sort out who is entitled to free school meals. However, it is essentially a measure of individual circumstances, whereas SIMD is a measure of the circumstances of an area and does not necessarily say anything about the circumstances of the individual. We know that there are more poor people living in areas outwith SIMD 1 and 2 than within it, so it is by no means a precise correlation between the disadvantage of the individual and SIMD. I think that this is a very complex issue. The Royal Society has responded to the consultation on measuring the attainment gap and has come to the conclusion that although the notion of keeping the measures few and simple has a lot to commend it, the complexity of the issues is probably such that that is not an aspiration which can be realised and that we probably have to mix SIMD with other measures, perhaps the free school meal entitlement 1, which looks at the circumstances of the individual. I agree with you that SIMD has some considerable merits, but on its own it does not provide a secure basis for that. I thank you for your attendance today. That brings us to the end of the public part of the meeting. I will now wait for the gallery to clear.