 Good morning and warm welcome to the 20th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2019. Can I remind everyone present to turn mobile phones and other devices to silent for the duration of the meeting? We have received apologies from Tavish Scott this morning. Our first agenda item is a decision on whether to take consideration of a draft report on subject choices in private at future meetings. Are the committee content to do that? Agenda item 2 is a decision on whether to take consideration of the work programme on 26 June in private. Are the committee content to do that? The next two agenda items are to do with subordinate legislation or one agenda item, two pieces of subordinate legislation. First piece is to consider the Education Scotland Act 1980, Modification, Regulations 2019, SSI 2019-179. The details of the instrument are provided in paper 1. Do the committee have any comments on this instrument? The second piece of subordinate legislation is the committee to consider is the Abertay University Scotland Order of Council 2019, SSI 2019-163. The details of this instrument are provided in paper 2 of the committee papers. Do members have any comments on this instrument? Thank you very much. That completes agenda item 3. As we move to agenda item 4, could I please declare an interest in that I am the vice chair of CERC and also a member of the British Computer Society. Our next item of business is the evidence session in the STEM, an early years education inquiry. Can I thank all of those who have helped to arrange the primary education conference last week? That included organising a really insightful visit for members of the committee to inform and would like to thank the primary science teaching trust for that opportunity. We are thoroughly engaged with the young people and the teachers that we met at the Children's Conference and at the awards ceremony on Thursday night. It is very inspiring to see the brilliant work that has been done by teachers across the whole of the UK. This morning, I would like to welcome to the committee Shona Burrow, who is a teacher in Rathaw Primary School, Lorna Haye, who is a teacher in Chukar Primary School—I forgot that. Alistair MacGregor, the chief executive officer of the Scottish Schools Education Research Centre, CERC, and Dr Karen Petrie, associate dean for learning and teaching in science and engineering at the University of Dundee, and today representing the British Computer Society. Finally, Professor Leslie Yellowlee, chair of the Learning Society's group on the Scottish STEM education. If the panel would like to take part or answer any of the questions, it is a big panel, so if you do not feel that you need to contribute to have questions, it would be very helpful if you could not answer for the sake of it. Of course, if you are something insightful to say, we would be delighted to hear it. I would like to start by asking the members to lay out a little bit about their experience and their experience in the area of the STEM inquiry. I will start with Dr Petrie. I am a computing lecturer when I am not being a associate dean for learning and teaching. I did quite a lot of work with local primary schools and primary schools throughout Scotland, in particular helping them to deliver the computing science part of the education and also the digital skills part of the education remit, and I have helped to organise a number of events to help for CPD for teachers in that context. Before I came here today, I asked a lot of the local schools that I worked with. What is the one thing that you would like me to bring to this inquiry, and I thought that I would start there? The main thing that has come back that has quite surprised me was the thing that has helped them the most to deliver the curriculum, which is a working internet connection. It surprised me that that was the one thing, but from four separate schools now I have had some tweets this morning saying that that is the biggest barrier. Any given day, they cannot trust it to be there. It is very difficult to use a lot of digital skills and a lot of the technology teaching, which is online, as I am sure you know, if you do not have a working internet connection. I thought that I would start there. Was that geographically based? All of those schools are in Dundee, but we were talking about it earlier and realising that it is more widespread than that. It was not just because there was a rural element to the Wi-Fi connections. No, one of those schools is central Dundee, so you would not expect it to have internet issues. I am Alison McGregor and I am the chief executive officer at CERC. I have been imposed for just over a year and a half, and during that period of time the organisation has gone through a significant amount of organisational change, but also some diversification as well. Part of that diversification is to broaden our offering to include early years practitioners, and now also childminders. CERC has three core functions supporting STEM education across early years practitioners, primary schools, secondary school teachers and also school technicians. The first one is career long professional learning, which our unique selling point is our professional learning, whether it is a twilight session, a half-day session or a full-day session. It is practical, hands-on, experiential and backed up by the appropriate level of pedagogy to support that. Our second function is that of health and safety, and that is supporting the education community in Scotland. Health and safety can sometimes appear to be quite bureaucratic and may actually be part of our reason why practical STEM-based activities are not undertaken in the classroom. We provide common sense advice to the teaching profession in Scotland to make sure that that does not become a barrier. Thirdly, in relation to inspiration, we have responsibility for wider STEM engagement projects such as the responsibility for the STEM ambassador programme in Scotland, teacher placements in Scotland and the young STEM leader programme. All of those, we have interactions with early years practitioners. I am here representing the learning societies group based at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. I chair that group. The group was set up in 2012 to bring together learning societies to agree common ways forward with suggestions, working together in order to form a portal for Scottish Government, for different groups for the GTCS, for lots of different groups to come and work through us together. I am going to read off the seven learning societies, else I will miss one out and then I will not be at all popular. The learning societies group comprises the Association for Science Education, the British Computering Society, the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Biology, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Scottish Mathematical Society. You can see that we cover most of the STEM subjects. Having read the report of your last meeting, I would like to say that I was chair of the Tapping All Our Talents report as well. If you want to ask me anything on that, I am very happy to do that. I also chair the STEM strategy equality subgroup established by the Scottish Government. I have several hats on. Should any of those hats be appropriate for today? I have met some of you before. I am a primary school teacher in particular in Glenrothes. With a particular interest in engineering, I completed a postgraduate certificate in engineering STEM learning. I am just reiterating a lot of what I said before, the research and what I found in school is a lack of confidence for that particular spoke before about not bundling STEM as one thing and looking at the discrete parts and finding that perhaps technology and engineering is where there is a lack of confidence. In our school, we have worked very hard to increase the visibility of engineering within our school. We are a pilot for the institution of primary engineers, which is a whole-school approach to developing security-mindedness, STEM and employability skills in primary age children. We are developing that and trying to move to embedding STEM within what we do. We have seen in that short time that confidence among staff is beginning to increase. That is where I come from. I am a primary teacher in Edinburgh Council. I am currently in primary 4, but most of my experience has been within the early years setting, so nursery and primary 1. Hopefully, I will be able to give some experience from those years. I am also a parent of two children at nursery, so I come here not only as a teacher but also as a parent. I hope that I can share some knowledge from that side as well. I also thank you very much for the submissions to the committee, which were very helpful. I am going to open up to questions. I invite Mr Gray. In the course of the inquiry that we have done, we have heard a lot of examples of good practice and good initiatives. It is really quite impressive work that is under way, but it is largely driven or seems to be largely driven by the interests and passion of particular people in particular places. To be fair, a lot of our witnesses have been those people, as you would expect. My question really is, how can we mainstream this work so that the children and young people's experience of STEM does not depend on the good luck of having somebody with an engineer and passion or whatever available at the time? How can we make this central to our education system? From my point of view, we need to build capacity within our school. We are now trying to build capacity within the rest of the staff. The headteachers recognise that myself and another teacher have that particular passion and what would happen if we were to suddenly go elsewhere. We are now trying this session to build capacity, and I will partly be funded to work with other staff and team teaching and to give them confidence to the same level. Any opportunities that teachers can have to work collegiately and to share their knowledge because there is a lack of confidence among other people. I would like to point out that reading all the submissions, there are excellent opportunities to get funding. The leadership and collegiate professional learning fund is there that can be used. It can pay for supply cover so that teachers can be released to work with teachers who have more experience. However, money is not an issue, it is actually the bodies. My headteachers said to me that it is not a problem to find money to cover you, but I cannot physically get a supply teacher in here. There is a bigger issue. How do we address the shortage? It is well and good saying that we can give you this money to fund you to be released from class, but if you cannot get any supply teachers in to cover you, that is irrelevant. I think that there is a bigger issue in terms of how do we create a bank of supply teachers that can go into schools and release staff to cascade that knowledge so that all schools are getting the same access? I do not know what your perspective is, but we spoke about that on the phone. That is a real issue. I spoke to my mum about this. She was a teacher. We lived in Gateshead for many years. I remembered that, at one point, when she first started, she worked for the local council as a permanent supply teacher. She was based at a teacher centre. There was a team of them, and their job was to go into it. If there were teachers that needed to come to the centre to do some training and whatever, they would be cascaded out to the schools to cover for that. The council at that time put a lot of money in. Is that a solution somewhere that we can entice more people into supply teaching but have a permanent bank of teachers that can then go out to work with schools? Unfortunately, in Fife, our teacher centre got knocked down a few years ago, so I do not know where they would be based. That is my perspective. We have to get to a point where we can get teachers who are confident to work with other teachers and develop that confidence. I was just going to say that what you have said is absolutely correct. Cluster teaching is vitally important here. You have to look to see where you can get specialisms and that they can help out. That is one way forward. I think that that is an immediate way forward. CLPL, and I am sure that Alistair will say something from Cirque's point of view, because I think that there is a body that is set up to help you to do that. You have to look on the short term. Some of the things that we have been talking about is the short term, and please do not leave your school, because it is important to recognise where there is strength and to build on that strength and to celebrate that strength and to share that good practice. However, you can also look long term. If you are looking long term, then what we should be doing is making sure that everybody that goes into primary school teaching has some sort of science qualification at school. Start off, let us make sure that everybody has at least one level 5 qualification, so that they have some confidence in science as a whole, and then maybe raise that or spread it to have more than two or three. However, at the moment, there are a significant number of primary school teachers who enter the training ITE with absolutely no science background at all. If you have no science background at all, then you are actually starting from a very low baseline. How can you help and how can you inspire our young people to take up science and engineering if you have not been inspired yourself? There is a long term plan where we should be looking to make sure that all our primary school teachers are comfortable teaching science and have an experience of that science as well, because it is not only the science, it is the pedagogy of teaching science. It is the whole how you think scientifically, how you look at data, how you interpret that data, how you problem solve. That is all absolutely crucial. We should have a long term plan and a short term plan. Dr Allan, was that a supplementary on that or that you come in at the moment and I will bring in the other panel members? On that point, you are making the point about entrance qualifications, if you like, for teaching. Is there also a role for the universities, for people coming into initial teacher education who do not have that science background to provide something? Absolutely. I am a firm believer of that. The curriculum for ITE, whether they are coming in as a graduate into it or whether they are starting off straight from school or college or wherever, there is work to be done to make sure that the curriculum is properly developed to allow teachers to have the confidence. We come back to the confidence and it is about giving the teachers the confidence to be able to engage with the pupils to be able to deliver that. I firmly believe that there is work to be done across the board. I have highlighted one, and you have highlighted another part. I think that CLPL is another area that we could highlight. I think that there are lots of different things that could be done, but I think that there needs to be a degree of direction given to that. I will be supplemented to the practitioners on Professor Yellow Tree's point with regard to those qualifications. We heard last week that our primary teachers are meant to be generalists, and our secondary teachers are subject specialists. I am a modern studies teacher to train. I would love every primary teacher to have that at higher modern studies, but practically that is not realistic. I would like to hear from the practitioners if they would agree with that assertion about having that N5-level qualification, because at the moment under the BGE, everybody coming into the profession should at least have an exposure until the end of S3 to science and technologies through the BGE anyway. Do you think that it should be a requirement that they have that N5-level qualification as practitioners? Before that, when that was raised, I would be hesitant to go on for it. I think that there are already barriers to getting people to become teachers, and I just feel that adding another barrier might just restrict the numbers. However, I do see that we need to do something so that teachers can do further training whilst they are already on the course, but I would just be hesitant to create more barriers when we need more people to enter the profession. I think that it is useful to have national 5 and perhaps a science or a computing subject, but I also think that there is scope for working more collegially with our secondary colleagues. I think that we are also looking to industry for potential links to get expertise and to get training with that so that when teachers are in school, we have access to people who have the knowledge and skill and resources to be able to support us to teach our youngsters. I concur with what my colleagues have said. There are probably three things that I just want to touch on and what has been said already. The first one is that whole thing about teachers' self-confidence. I think that it is really, really important that they have that degree of self-confidence to go into the classroom and to actively participate in stem-based activities. What we are also missing is that it is not just about self-confidence, you can be very self-confident if you do not have that underpinning knowledge and skills. To support that level of confidence, then it is our learner that could be disadvantaged. I think that the confidence and the competence needed to go hand in hand. Linked to the teacher training, I think that there is an opportunity, so we are currently having dialogue with some of the ITEs in Scotland in relation to digital skills. We talked to one university who has a digital skills programme that is fully integrated into their primary ITE. We talked to another one and it is probably an hour and a half session. What we want to do is to work with the ITEs to provide that level of digital support. I suppose that, on that journey as an organisation, we are looking to become a credit rating body. Again, we see that we would have a natural role to work alongside ITEs to make sure that we are providing a master's level type qualification to support primary teachers coming into the teaching profession. I suppose that I am a bit of an optimist. I think that there are opportunities for us. I think that there are opportunities from the Scottish Government's STEM strategy. I think that that could be a real hook for local authorities and particularly our RICs in particular. Discussions that I have with primary teachers who come in to undertake professional learning. They say to us that if STEM is not on the schools improvement plan, then it is not going to go anywhere. I think that there is an opportunity with Education Scotland's recent recruitment of their STEM advisers to have that particular resource as a positive tool to move forward in relation to making sure that STEM appears. I suppose that there is always this perception as well that, if STEM does not appear in a schools improvement plan but literacy in university does, that means that you cannot do STEM. What we say is natural fact that you can use STEM as the vehicle for taking forward that literacy in university. I think that I like to be positive. I think that there is an opportunity. The Education Scotland regional advisers are just in post and I think that there is an opportunity for us to engage positively with STEM to make sure that the message is being spread. I think that there is another way to look at this. Do all primary schools have to be science and technology specialists or do we change the primary school model slightly to have one or two science and technology specialists in each school who deliver that teaching and who also upskill the other primary school teachers. I have seen this model work so there is a ffintry primary school near us who has actually hired somebody mainly to teach computing. She is just some other teaching as well but she is a computing specialist and it is quite a big primary school but that has worked really well for them and they are now a very digitally literate STEM school due to that model. I feel that for primary school teachers we might just be asking too much to ask them to be specialists at everything and be able to teach everything to the same level and so maybe a new model is what is required. That links to what Leslie was talking about in relation to that cluster based model. Both CERT through its primary cluster programme and also the Wood Foundation Education Scotland through the RACE programme is not about making sure that every single teacher is a STEM specialist but it is about saying let us take some key devoted primary teachers, early use practitioners such as yourselves and let us provide you with some enhanced mentoring and leadership skills. Let us provide you with additional practical hands on experiential type of professional learning that you can then go back into your school and work with your peers and work with your learners so that you can go back into your local authority and cascade that CPD in that way and therefore it is not meaning that everyone has to be that specialist but it is a cascade model and certainly we have piloted a primary cluster programme for the past six years independently evaluated and it is coming out saying it works. You have highly motivated mentors. Those mentors have developed their own pedagogic and assessment skills and they have promoted science and technology activities in the classrooms across the region so there are models there. I think that we need to build upon those models so that I have a proven track record to work. I am just going to add to both those points that in our school for the last probably three years STEM has primarily been delivered by one of my colleagues, Laura Peden, as part of our non-class contacts agreement. During the time that she had the children, the rest of the staff agreed that they wanted Laura to teach the STEM. We have been doing that for three years. We are now at a point next year where Laura is going to be back into class and there was a real fear between both of us that if she is back in her own class now and the rest of the learners who have been getting access to STEM activities weekly for several years are suddenly not going to have that access, which is why we are building capacity amongst the staff. While I am saying that I do not necessarily think that a single specialist in a primary school to do all of the teaching of all the learners is the right answer because then if that person suddenly leaves then none of the rest of the staff have the capacity to deliver it themselves whereas the model that you are saying whereas Laura and I are going to be mentoring other staff so that they will still be delivering those experiences to have somebody like in a high school, a specialist that only does that. I just think that that is not the best situation. All teachers need to be given their learners opportunities. If you do not do it, you lose it. If we are not teaching STEM then that confidence and competence is never going to grow. That is really helpful. At just a Kenya point of clarification, because at this point about the national improvement framework, it is an important one, I think, in that we had evidence on this from Education Scotland. The Scottish Government last week and their point was that STEM is not part of the national improvement framework in the way that literacy and numeracy and wellbeing is. Just to check, I think that Alasdair in particular spoke about that. Are you saying that as long as that is the case all the efforts that you have been describing, I was going to say, may come to naught, that is an exaggeration but will be an uphill struggle because schools will see their required focus as being much more about literacy and numeracy and wellbeing. Is that fair? I think that there perhaps is some anecdotal evidence to support that assertion. I am just going to come in with some anecdotal evidence, which I think is quite interesting. We had the Trick Did You Fest, which is a CPD event for primary school teachers, teaching mainly computing skills about four weeks ago in Dundee on a Saturday. The first thing that I would say is that actually we had over 100 school teachers show up on their day off unpaid, which shows the willingness to teach and to learn these areas, so it was really good. One of the teachers at that event stood up and said, at the moment, I don't deliver the ILOs in computing science at all to my class. I think that I can get away with that because nobody will ever inspect those ILOs for computing science. That surprised me that she didn't say that it was fine, she was there to learn how to do it and she wanted to do it but she hand delivered for a number of years and she thought that nobody would ever pick up on that as being an issue. I wonder how true that is throughout some of our schools. Professor Yellowlees, I am very interested in the issue about staffing. You will recall at the 2016 festival that the Royal Society of Chemistry held a cross-indynamic earth that they made a very specific call that they would like to see a specialist scientist in every primary school. Do you feel that that was the right call, given what some of your colleagues and some of our previous witnesses were saying, that perhaps that's not necessary if we can ensure that there is team teaching and there's cluster, or do you feel that that was just a nice additional thing that would be very helpful to science if it was possible? I think that we'd all agree that it would be nice if it was possible because we'd all agree that you could have a specialist subject in lots of different areas. Why wouldn't you have that? I think that it's an ultimate goal, what's not to like about it, but as a realistic goal, I think probably it would be—and here I'm trying to speak on behalf of all the learned societies rather than I know I have a special affiliation with the Royal Society of Chemistry but I'm trying to step back from that now—and say that I'm a great fan and I think that the whole learned societies group are great fans of cluster teaching, so I think that if you can get a specialist teacher or various specialist teachers, because if you're talking about cluster teaching then you can have various people coming in at various times and I think that way you cover much more of science, engineering, technology and maths than you would if you just had one because how can you be a specialist by its very nature and cover all of science and technology? You can't. So I think that it's much better to go the cluster route and have different specialist teachers coming and spend a day at a time at a different school or maybe only for a term and then go somewhere else. I think that what I don't like is single intervention. I think that that doesn't work, that's been proven not to work. It's very attractive to groups to do single intervention because then you feel you've achieved something, you've done something but have you really made a lasting difference? No, you haven't. So I think we have to go away from that and I come back slightly from what the Royal Society of Chemistry advocated three years ago. That ties in Mr McGregor with an interesting point you made about you can have all the confidence in the world but if you don't have the necessary knowledge and the specific science training you're not going to go terribly far in this respect. What discussions have you had? A very specific question about what discussions you've had with the universities, you mentioned one example perhaps hasn't progressed as much as one of the other ones. What discussions have you had with the GTCS about trying to promote more of this specialist knowledge and therefore a greater lead into an affinity with the science subjects that obviously promotes that greater confidence and enjoyment of teaching them? Within our organisation we have an advisory governance structure and we have a professional development advisory board and that's got representatives from the ITE sector, it's got representatives from Education Scotland, it's got representatives from the Scottish Government etc and those of the GTCS and we have floated the idea of CERC working in partnership to provide a certificated programme for practitioners which is based on developing that level of competence required to undertake not just science but STEM based activities. I would say that it's probably going to take us a significant period of time to move that forward quickly. I'm very interested in that comment. Do you feel that those who would like to come into the teaching profession as STEM experts, is it a question that they don't have the necessary knowledge and background from their university degrees and their experience in other educational institutions or is it a case of not being confident and sufficiently competent when it comes to disseminating that knowledge and teaching skills in the classroom, because these are two different things? I think that it's probably a combination of both. I think that it's an ongoing discussion that we continue to have with the ITE institutions and with the GTCS Scotland. I think that they see the benefits of that type of opportunity moving forward, but I think that it would be a challenge to move that forward in a timely manner. Can you just explain why? We want to see this progress, hence the reason why we're doing this inquiry. If there is some block in the system that's not allowing you to further those ideas and to ensure that those who are becoming science teachers are of the highest order, what is it that you're a bit reluctant to say? I think that it comes down to the view that perhaps there isn't sufficient time within a post-grad primary teacher's timetable to allow that to take place. We have other suggestions that we can make in relation to twilight sessions, summer school sessions and online activities to support that. Discussions are at an early stage, but, like you, I'd quite like to see that fast-tracked as well. Professor Yellowlees, do you agree with that point that that's something that we need to work on to ensure that universities and other educational institutions are developing those points? Absolutely, because I think that there are many providers of IT in Scotland, but I think that if we're wanting to improve the lot of all our children at schools in Scotland, then you have to do it across the board and you have to make sure that everybody has bought into this and everybody is carrying that out. Otherwise, you'll still get disparity of experience for the children and that's not what we're wanting. Okay, thank you. Mr Gray. I'd like to return to the points around CPD and specifically what Alasdair brought up in your opening remarks around early years. We got some interesting evidence in our last session on this around the tension that there perhaps is with giving early years practitioners, not talking about nursery teachers here, but the rest of the early years workforce, giving them the kind of CPD opportunities in STEM that are required when that's a workforce with a much higher turnover than the teaching workforce. It was raised with us essentially that there's a reluctance from management from local authorities there to spend money on a workforce that has that higher level of turnover. Is that something that you've detected or experienced? What's your understanding of how much access those early years practitioners are getting? I suppose from a CERC perspective, this is a new area for us, so we've only really focused on early years in the past year, so we have some very specific early year interventions that we offer. We wish to continue to progress with that on an on-going basis. I can only talk from where we are just now in relation to our early attempts to provide support for that particular education community. From a nursery teacher's background, in terms of early years practitioners, a lot of the staff who I have worked with have undergone training such as Forest Kindergarten, and they have a lot of STEM training background, but there were then barriers to them being able to undertake those activities such as the short nursery hours, sort of three hours, ten minutes by the time the children were on the minibus and ready to go, it was time to come back. There were barriers in terms of staff to children ratios, funding for minibuses, so perhaps the issue is not so much the high staff turnover, but it's actually how the staff can deliver those activities with those barriers in place. I'm not talking about that across the board, that's just anecdotal experience that I've got, but there are quite a few barriers to addressing those things and high staff turnover potentially might not be one of them. So in that particular situation, was that something that the local authority were trying to work with nurseries to address that, or was it something that wasn't quite filtering back up to a level where the support could be brought in to address it? Not as far as I knew, I think it was this is the hours that the children have to do and you have to either make it work or don't undertake those activities and try to find something else within your setting, so the children were missing out on that Forest Kindergarten experience. The two things that you were saying there are work that we do with the early years practitioners and also with the child minding education community, where there are issues in relation to being released to come out to do face-to-face type of professional learning, the time taken away from your teaching duties or your practitioners used to do that. We operate a online digital type of platform that's a twilight session. That's about trying to still do face-to-face professional learning to support an understanding of STEM based on practical activities, but it's done through digital technology. We will broadcast live from our broadcast studios in Dunfermline out to potentially 45-50 schools where there are a variety of different types of practitioners who will be there. We send out boxes of resources in advance and we basically do a cook-a-long, so we say here's the resources, here's the activities, we will show you what you can do with these resources, but we'll also share with you what the underpinning knowledge is linked to this, what the scientific or STEM based concepts and principles are. That seems to work because it's a short intervention, usually an hour, turn hour and a half maximum. That does work and it's interesting that having a discussion next week with one local authority who went to work in partnership with CERC to put in place a primary cluster type programme, but very specifically focusing on that transition between nursery and primary one. We will be hopefully working in partnership to see what that looks like because we've talked about cluster models, but the cluster model will only work if there is a legacy in place to make sure that it's sustainable. That's the beauty of the programme that we've piloted over the past six years. It's proven that there is a legacy there, so when you have staff churn and you have staff movement, it doesn't mean that the programme stalls, because that whole thing about the roll-out of career-long professional learning that is very bespoke to that local community is still there. The legacy is there, which for us is really, really important. Are you working with both local authority and private sector early years practitioners? Or is it just local authorities for now? At the moment, because of our funding regime, we are working with local authorities. Do you expect that there is an appetite for this within the private sector? Have you had any contact from folk around the private sector? We have. There is a massive appetite for doing it, but again, the nature of the funding that we have as an organisation comes from many circumstances from the public purse either through the Scottish Government or through local authorities who are members of our organisation. Therefore, our focus is primarily working in the state sector. Just one last question, convener. Moving away from early years and back into primary, but looking at the local authority level of understanding of this, do you believe that local authorities have a depth of understanding about staff need for CPD in terms of the specific subjects within STEM? Or is the attitude at a local authority level that STEM is the priority, if it is one umbrella term and staff require training in STEM, whatever they might understand that to be? I think that that may vary from local authority to local authority. There is one local authority who I know I have put a blanket ban on anybody travelling to any form of professional learning out with that local authority. That is a significant disadvantage. From my perspective, we keep on talking about STEM. I suppose that because STEM is used so much, it has a degree of visibility, but I also wonder whether, when you talk to young people about STEM, it also has a barrier. It is a barrier to access because you talk about scientists and there is a look of fear. You talk about engineering, there is a look of fear. We have primary practitioners come into us and we do science-based work with them, science-based professional learning. We don't take them into labs, we don't get into our white codes, we do it in a standard classroom scenario because that breaks down the barriers and the perceptions of what STEM is about. For me, when we talk about STEM, I do not think of it as being science, engineering, technology, mathematics. I see it as being that sort of collection of transferable skills within the context of science or technology. For me, it is about the promotion of the skills that STEM subjects can give you. That is, to us, more important than the silos of science and technology and engineering and mathematics. Can I just follow up on that? I think that STEM, as a word, was very useful initially because it brought together a lot of the pedagogy, a lot of the discipline of undertaking science. It translates to social science. It is not limited to that, but now almost people think of STEM as, oh, that's everything. I think that what we should be looking at is interdisciplinarity and where STEM can mean interdisciplinarity across the sciences and technology and engineering and maths, then it's working well. When you think of it as a single subject, then that's not working well. I think that what's underpinning it is learning this, is helping our young people to gain the skills and to be able to use those skills, which then make them highly employable, great. The earlier you start that, the better, because then they're not going to be frightened. For me, I feel so sad when people say they're frightened of engineering or science. Why would you be frightened of it? It's really exciting. At the moment our lives are underpinned by a lot of what science and engineering can deliver. I would want our young people to be excited by that and would want them to be positively engaged with it and take up with it and not be, stand back and say, this isn't for me, it's for everyone and it should be for everyone and that's the message we've got to get across. If you want to extend that, you've got to get across to the parents as well because they've got to understand sciences for everybody. I think Ross to combat your point about local authorities perspective. Circus and organisation is a member-based organisation so we are funded by every local authority and certainly we are the first port of call for local authorities who are looking for stem-based practical hands-on experiential professional elements so they will come to us. I think they know there is at least one mechanism there for them but there continues to be that issue that our practitioners have talked about and that's being released to attend these types of interventions. As an organisation we have to think about how we respond to that so yet we do a lot of practical activities, practical professional learning within our organisation and in Firmland but we now also go out and do that locally and more local interventions because we realise there are issues with release. I was undertaking an event on Saturday on behalf of the committee and with the cadet organisations in Scotland and one of the people was going to say they did STEM by stealth so when they do the engineering and they do the work everybody's engaged and as soon as the brand is being anything to do with STEM people get right and so just another little anecdotal piece. Oliver, I knew you wanted to come in this supplementary, could you go on with your substantive questions after it as well please? Yes, thank you. Alasdor Gregor, I wanted to come back just to the comments you'd made to Ross Greer in my local authority, the Scottish Government according to their own figures. I suggest that almost 40 per cent of ELC will have to be delivered by the PVI sector. Do you think then that there's a case for looking at how we fund support for those groups because obviously that will create an inequity for the young people accessing a Government-funded provision that's been offered by others? There is an opportunity, opportunity comes as a cost as an organisation we can do more to support but we are probably at a tipping point in relation to the level of professional learning that we can offer so last year funded to undertake 5,200 CPD units across the Education and Community in Scotland we managed to do more than six and a half thousand so well above our but we're now at a tipping point whereby we are kind of limited to what we can do in relation to the resources and we have available to support that so for us STEM about trying to work in partnership, it's a working partnership with the Scottish Child Minding Association working in partnership with the early year Scotland to see what we can do in partnership to try to support the needs that are undoubtedly going to be there in the system. I guess that other panel members think it was odd that we've got a significant proportion of a Government-funded initiative being provided through the PVI sector but maybe less training and support going to going to practitioners working in that area. Is that not something I think I'm able to comment on? I think you've led us well to say yes. Thank you. Just as I can say, because I do think it's an anomaly that has been created, I'm also going to move on more substantively to rural areas and whether or not you think that there is good enough provision there. I was particularly interested in specialisation and custom models because they become more difficult when you talk about one or two teacher schools in which there are many across Scotland. Do you think that we need to do more for rural areas? I can come in there. Dundee is a city but we're quite close to a lot of rural areas, so I work with a lot of rural primary schools. In the one or two teacher schools, there is some excellent practice. There is one school that is quite close to us where if you talk to the pupils, they'll say that they have a very computer science-based school and they're very proud of that. That's the primary twos and threes. There are other schools where they really struggle with the resources. I think that part of that is probably the teaching. If you don't have a teacher with knowledge and advice of science and technology, that's also going to be a problem. It's also the physical resources. We see that the bigger schools and city centres often have an IT suite where they can deliver things like computing science teaching. That's less common in the rural schools that I see anyway. I know of a school where they have 12 laptops that they wheel into the classroom as and when required but they're so old that they have to be plugged in, and so it actually becomes a tripping hazard. The teacher said to me, I'd love to do something that was quite physical because these are primary two students in pupils and quite physically and active and have them doing something and then doing it on a computer but you can't. You can either do one or the other because it's a tripping hazard if you have the computers in the room. The internet is genuinely an issue in quite a lot of our rural schools. I hear one rural school said, we can't actually have all the computers on the internet at once or it will just crash reliably, which is a major issue for teaching computing science. I think that there are specific issues that the rural schools have that perhaps the city centre schools don't have, especially those that are two classrooms and see one or two teachers. I think that there is an issue with rural schools and making sure that the pupils there have the experiences that city pupils have because of course the science centres, which are funded to do a lot of this work as well, are city-based. I know that a lot of them have extensive rural programmes but still it's not the same, is it? We have to spend some time seeing how best to help all our communities to have access to STEM teaching. Computer internet-based learning has its place but I think for those of us who have enjoyed a career or an education deeply entrenched in science and engineering would also argue that you do need to have the lab-based experience, you do need to get your hands on making, I mean that's what the attraction for many of doing science is, is doing the practical aspects of it. I think that we have to make sure that we have a balance there and so to rely simply on the internet to give all that experience in my book won't work because you'll still have at the end of the day then people who are not confident about undertaking an experiment and sometimes failing that experiment and you can fail on a computer of course you can but I think it's that experience of a lab-based and putting on the white lab coat if that's what you know chimes in your mind of doing a lab-based experiment but I think that is important and we mustn't ever forget that because if we forget that and we discount practical based learning at that level then we're ignoring and we're discounting the whole of STEM in my opinion and I think rural schools for me encompass that beautifully and if we can solve it there then we've solved it everywhere so we have to look hard to see how we can do it. Do you have any suggestions? Yes I do I think so I like the going back to more like a cluster approach where we've put in place experts throughout the whole of Scotland each district now each area has an expert in that I think it'll take time for them to go around because it's like a pyramid effort you know and we've put the ones in the top and we have to cascade it down but I think we have started well I think with these new initiatives will help that happen but it will take time. Thank you. Thank you Dr Allan. Thank you. I was interested in some of the issues around overcoming inequalities we've talked in this committee before about how early you can see educational or life opportunity inequalities emerging in young children so I was interested to know what can be done to ensure that at the very earliest stages where without entering into the discussion about how you measure these inequalities what we're doing to recognise inequalities in terms of access to science and scientific outlook and scientific opportunities what is the first thing that can be done in early years to recognise where those gaps exist? So I think we have to look at the curriculum as a whole I think we have to look to see where and to be very self-critical of where those inequalities lie and make sure that we consciously address that but to do that I think it has to be done across the board for everything for all subjects and science will just benefit from that as well. So I am a great favour I'm a great believer in the work that's been done with the Institute of Physics as a whole school attempt it was went in as starting on physics and they quickly realised that actually was better to do it across the whole school so I think that should be looked at but we've got to just be a lot more self-critical and where it makes sense to be very prescriptive about it and you know I think we just have to sometimes just bite the bulletins and say this is going to you know we're going to try this based on experience elsewhere where it is available. Interdisciplinarity actually has a really big part to play here I mean if we look at computing if we look at degrees we find that the traditional engineering degrees are still male dominated I can tell you that at least in Dundee our anatomy degree is female dominated where do we see a science and technology degree that's equal biomedical engineering biomedical engineering is you know it's actually slightly dominated by women but it's about 50-50 and it's because it applies to the engineering it appeals to science appeals to the medical and that for me is what we have to do right from the early years in the primary school so it doesn't become about you're either an engineer or you're you know a biologist the modern world there is no difference it's about interdisciplinarity and everything working together some of that equality or some of the overcoming inequality is obviously also about overcoming economic inequalities if you want to put it like that but certainly overcoming deprivation I was interested in something that professor yellowies you said about including parents I wonder can any of you say a bit more about what can be actively done to bring parents into class and I've certainly seen examples of where this can be where this is done to overcome parental fears never mind that the children's fears about science what can be done about that I think it's not only the fears I think it's misconceptions that people have so you know if we talk about engineering there are a lot of misconceptions about what what an engineer is particularly from the parents so I think there there is a whole body of work that has to be done and for me it's all about building science capital it's all about making sure that our society is understands where the importance and where science and technology and engineering where it all lies and where it underpins so of course it's much easier to talk about pupils isn't it because they all come into you know into a central into a school and we can then cope with the curriculum of schools but I think there are many events that certainly I've been involved in where you go in and involve the children during the day and then they bring their parents back at night however that tends to bring the parents in that are already interested in that because the children are interested in that and I think it is a real difficulty we have where with the people who have not bought into where the importance of stem where the importance of science where the importance of engineering lies and I wish I had the answer to that but many people I mean I think I think we all have a part to play so I think science centres have a part to play I think science festivals have a part to play and we know that there's science festivals now being developed across Scotland in rural areas as well and I think although they you could you could label them as single interventionist I don't think you should see them as that because they have a much wider reach than that but I think we have to look to do that and I think we have to look at the media how can we engage with the media to make everybody more aware of the benefits of science and engineering so I think there's not a single answer I wish there was because and and then we would have done it wouldn't we but that's true across the board but it must be possible because if I look across the world there are certain other countries that have huge science capital that their communities are well versed in the importance of it and we should look to see how they've done that and why that is why it's worked and what we can do better here. Well I think many if you're talking about engineering for example I would look at India for example is a hugely successful country where engineers are highly regarded, highly valued and you know the children go to school with the expectation that many of them will leave as engineers we do not have that in Scotland and much of the far east is like that as well so we should look to see why they value it so much more than we do in Scotland. Can I just come in two points here firstly when you're talking about parental engagement I think that's a much bigger discussion and it's not maybe just stem you'll find quite often that the parents who will come into the school will be the same parents all the time and that actually engaging all the parents it's a much kind of bigger issue with everything you know if you put on any event within school or you invite parents in you're going to get a cohort of parents who want to be there and there will be parents who are disengaged and who don't want to be part of their their child so I think parental engagement is a kind of much bigger issue and picking up on your point about other countries I came across an example in Germany where big mobile phone companies are creating resources for schools discovery boxes they're doing training for early year teachers and it's widespread widely spread across Germany and so there are other countries who are promoting STEM if you like within schools and certainly within early years setting and that would lend itself perfectly to learning through play and learning through discovery in the early years. I was involved recently in Scotland's biggest ever parent evening and I heard this quite a lot they think science is hard they think science and engineering is for the academically brilliant who are going to go to university and get a first class degree and then do a phd and we've got to change that message and then actually there's lots of things like apprenticeships out there, modern apprenticeships, graduate apprenticeships, foundation apprenticeships in science and especially in engineering and so and I don't think that message is out there so I wonder if somehow we can pair the apprenticeship message with a big fan-off with this whole idea of science engineering being for everyone and there being career paths for everyone. Shona's point about parental engagement that's an issue whatever it is we've been doing a lot of outdoor learning in our school and we used one of our providers to put on an event in school so that the parents could engage in the same activities as the children and get an understanding of what they were learning and we had a handful of parents it really disappoints so that's across the board. One thing that we have done there are misconceptions I mean the research that I did last year for my postgrad yeah there's a lot of misconceptions about engineers in those careers and actually the engineers that I spoke to in industry most of them had been influenced towards that career path by a supportive parent so there definitely is issues there that need to be addressed within the media and things like that but one thing that we've done in our school we had a big STEM event a few months ago and we invited the parents in again yes you get your cohort that always come but there was other parents who perhaps don't normally and they were you know building capla blocks with the children they were making things out of connects and you know there was a real kind of buzz about the room in a real sense oh I had no idea that these were the kind of things that they were doing and you know the value of actually just you know it was that we did this thing it was 100 100 blocks 100 seconds see what you could build I mean you know it was like something x factor there was like yeah come on all this chain and they didn't realise that I will you know it's just building things out well it's not just building things out of bricks but you know actually bring it down to a level that they could kind of relate to and so that's certainly something as a school that we're looking to replicate on an annual basis to get to actually work with the the children on these kind of things and you know because we can do a bit to in school to try and develop that kind of STEM capital but unless something's happening you know at home with the parents I think it's it's going to be a challenge. I'm going to bring Miss Slamming in on that. I think I'm just interested not just in access to STEM subjects in all those experience but impact of disadvantage so it's not just there's not much access that will disproportionately less access for maybe more vulnerable children can I ask first of all about looked after children care experience children if you're relying on parental engagement how do you make up for that for a young person who might be in a care setting? In our school I'm trying to think when we probably had that event we have maybe a one or two looked after children but in certainly in one case they still had a carer with them to come in and engage in that activity so I mean that is an issue but not just for looked after it's an issue for any children with working parents and I'm a teacher and you know my girls came home the other day and upset because I wasn't there to share their learning with them but I need to be in front of a class so it's an issue that's an to engage parents if they're working parents because nowadays mum and dad are working and they can't always go so I think that is a that is a difficulty I wanted just on the question I know that the learning group that you represent did some work on the issue of resources in the school I wonder if you want to expand on that because my concern from what I read from that report was there is an issue about resource and support but when you then rely on parents to fill the gap disadvantaged young people that is reinforced absolutely so yes we did a body of work in in 2014 we're actually talking the other day about the need to maybe revisit some of the findings that we did there and there was an issue across all across the board of the resources that were available to teachers in primary schools to be able to undertake stem type activities and when we drilled further into that it was a case of if the school didn't have the resource because perhaps the local authority hadn't given them the resource or that the school had opted to spend their money some other way which these hard decisions have to be taken and I think we all recognise that that quite often they had to go to external sources of funding and of course the most common source of funding was parental parental funding to maybe set up a club or whatever it was or to be able to provide the materials the equipment whatever it was to be able to do the stem type activity and so there is obviously a correlation then between the children who come with a background that the parents can afford that or have access to it because quite often as well I think we shouldn't underplay the parents who will go in and help teach some of these subjects as well let's not underplay the contribution that makes as well and so yes you're right that will does impact and impinge on those from less advantaged backgrounds what is I mean did you make some recommendations around that are we saying in the same way that we've had an investigation into music tuition that actually one of its problems is not regarded as core should these practical activities be regarded as core business of a school and therefore it shouldn't be the mercy of whether you've got a talented parent or parents with resources that can fund that well I would what would you what would your recommendation be coming I mean I'd be interested if you are updating I'm sure the committee would be as well but just that challenge that actually you could end up place where we're reinforcing inequality because of the way in which these resources are accessed I think we were reluctant to make very firm conclusions because we were aware that we had a very small sample size so we had we only received responses from 39 primary schools and I think we really wished to engage with education scotland et cetera and other bodies to be able to expand that that was not taken up at the time perhaps now a better time you know it's all sometimes it relies on timing and perhaps we should go and look to see if there are there is an appetite to look further for that because I think data I'm a scientist so I love data and because I think you can then use the data whether you use it as your your baseline and you you measure from that or or whether it's telling you something concrete in the first thing but I think we need more data there but it does worry me that not everybody has access to that so would I believe do I believe it should be compulsory and in there yes of course I do but then I would say that wouldn't I but I would say that for a whole variety of reasons I think it's giving a very good training to our young people I think it's giving them a skill set that is is important in whatever line of study or work they go into and I think just increasing the science capital I come back to that again of our population is one that will only end up yielding positive results so yes I would make it compulsory I agree with that I mean we have a large number of primary school teachers early practitioners who come through CERC as an organisation on an annual basis so for primary first of April 18 first of March 2019 we had 3,285 primary attendances at our professional learning courses it would be soul destroying if we undertake all of that hands-on practical experiential learning underpinned by development of knowledge and skills if they then go back into their classroom situation and can't undertake that in the classroom situation we're very fortunate some of the money that we are allocated from for example the Scottish Government we dedicate to providing resources for those delegates who come to our courses so if we undertake a practical based activity with a primary delegate an early practitioner they take those resources back to their base to do that through the partnerships that we have externally the Adena trust for example any school who participates in a professional learning activity within CERC eligible to apply for a £350 grant you mentioned earlier about the primary science teaching trust they provide us with a significant amount of money around about £50,000 to support the development of bespoke cpd within these cluster communities and some of that is used to to buy resources to support that bespoke cpd so yeah I think I think it would be great to see that there was a core funding stream to support that practical type of STEM based activities in the classroom situation early years and establishments as well. Would you think inspection regime should value that when we're actually inspect what's happening in schools should that be something that should be interrogated? If the lack of resources is acting as a detriment to attainment and enjoyment of and efficacy in terms of science then yes I think it should be. I completely agree with that and I think there is maybe an issue with our inspectorate if they're not looking at the practical skills and what's actually going on within the classroom and the resources available and that to me actually that goes across STEM but it goes across everything. You need to have the resources to teach the full curriculum and if you don't have that then we have a massive issue. Miss Birrell I think you wanted to come in the issue of looked after children sorry we kind of moved on quickly. I was just going to discuss PEF and say that perhaps PEF could play a role in that. I know Lorna at your school you're using PEF for STEM. I don't know whether you wanted to kind of talk about that but it's the sustainability of PEF and is it going to keep going? I'll answer that point and come back to that. Absolutely as teachers we want our life to be made easy so if opening a box that's got all the kit to teach a science lesson takes two minutes whereas raking about in the cupboards for three hours in your non-class contact time trying to find a peachy dish then absolutely let's get as many kits as we can but yeah in our school STEM has been on our school improvement plan so some of that that PEF has been used to I was partly PEF funded this year to drive some of the initiatives within school we've also been lucky that we've been able to use some of that money for actually resources that we feel are can be used sustainably so we've managed to to get resources in and these are resources because that's part of the thing with PEF it needs to be sustainable that these resources can be used you know for practical kind of whether it's computing science or you know things like lego connects, cap plot all these kind of things but we're very aware that you know that funding is not an it's not a bottomless pot so we are very fortunate in our school that we have excellent access to wi-fi and things like that so we're able to to do a lot and coming back to professor yearly's point about we want the practical science we don't want everything on the internet I absolutely agree with that however having the access to the internet will support things like for example teaching the children coding on netbooks that kind of thing so you know that's where the resources are a problem I know I spoke to I went down to my nursery yesterday and spoke to them about this idea about computing science and ICT and they said we've got one smart board and a couple of bee-bots and that's it and you know and there's so many opportunities out there for you know developing those computational skills you know these are skills that are transferable you know it's not just in science context you know I did a lot of research and really value the engineering habits of mind and we're trying to push that through our schools so you've got things like systems thinking improving and problem finding creative problem solving adapting these are all skills that are not exclusive to engineering they're skills that are exclusive to life really um so yeah I think the concern is you know how do we how do we fund all these things because yes we need the if we're doing all the training there's nothing worse as you said I've been on courses where that's brilliant oh it's excellent you come back to school and go oh well we can't do that because we don't have this and we don't have that we don't have this you know and sometimes I'll give it I'll I'll go to the shop and at my own pocket I'll buy things but you know I can't fund resources for a whole class out of my own money or a whole school absolutely. Don't repeat say that actually a lot of our teachers are buying resources um and that came out really at the trick-ditch fest thing lots people said oh I bought the bee-bot for the nursery because they didn't have one and I think that's appalling that our teachers are paying out of their own pocket for things for classes the other point I was going to make is this is not just an injection of funding once because the very nature of science and especially technology is it goes out of date very quickly and I think a number of our schools have seen that they bought for example 20 laptops three years ago and they're already you know they don't battery life left they're beginning to die and when they're concerned about how they're going to replace these so I think we've got to be aware of the fact that this has got to be a continuous funding stream because these things just change so quickly and we want to keep up we want to make sure that they're getting the best resources and they're actually learning the latest technology not the one from five years ago. Just before we move on in the area of resources and it's something CERC have published on it it's about the role of technicians and in all school technicians work with primary cluster programmes and things like that although it's mainly for secondary schools have we seen an impact on what's happening with school technicians on the ability to do practical work? Two primary practitioners we would be best to say but I think if you're if you're looking to undertake STEM based practical activities in the classroom situation then who's going to set that up it would have to be the primary school teacher and when do they do that they have to do that when they've got non-teaching time how much non-teaching time do you have not very much so I think there are issues certainly there are major issues in relation to secondary school education perhaps not as acute within the primary sector but I'm happy to be proven wrong. I think I've certainly no experience of a technician coming into my school to set up things I mean that would be wonderful it's like some kind of fairy that's going to come you know it's the same as when you've got a gym lesson you know you've got to get the stuff out the cupboard before you've got the kids so break time or you know that's always quite a useful time to set up a science experiment but then if you're working on 50 minute periods and you're not starting until 10 to 12 and the previous teachers and you know then when do you set up so if you're lucky you might ask your pupil support assistant but if you only have a pupil support assistant for 50 minutes in a week then you know that that's a struggle so actually just having more hands to to do that sometimes you have to rely on them you know the maybe sometimes older children to go and and get the things out for the young particularly the younger children but um yeah I've certainly not seen um any presence of technicians in in my experience in primary we're going to move on to the issue of gender just before I do that can I put on record apologies of um Mr MacDonald who's had to leave this morning's apologies to the panel and I'll bring in Mr Mackay thank you convener yeah I'd like to return to the the subject we touched on briefly on gender equality or inequality um last week one of our witnesses Elizabeth Kelly suggested the the extent to which gender neutrality features as a theme in training of early years practitioners is mixed independent on who is delivering the training so I want to ask um you know what how much focus do you think um the the training has on that and then also once in place say an early years manager is it depending on their attitude how successful is that going to be is it down a lot to you know personal um attitude and determination to deliver gender neutral training so unfortunately I think at the moment the answer is yes it does depend on that and that's why I come back to my point I think we have to look at the curriculum as a whole and make sure it is gender neutral um we're aware that that biases can creep into children at a very early very young age um and the the press has been full of those examples so we're not short of examples um what we are short of is I I believe um a concerted effort to change the culture to to make it not acceptable um to have a curriculum that I'm not saying um that anybody deliberately set out to make the curriculum biased I don't believe that for a moment do I believe it's there yes I do um and I think what brought it home is is for me is when you talk about you know certain subject areas that the bias is in there um and the bias shouldn't be there um and it should be called out wherever it's found because it's not doing anybody any favours to put that bias I mean in the absence of kpi's in the stem to you know how can it be measured and should that be another aspect of the school inspection that you know they should be picking up on that to so yes but I think the school inspection can come further down the line actually what I would do is I would just pull experts in right from the word go I would just pull them in now and say look at our curriculum is this delivering what we want it to deliver or is it not and now those experts could be could bring them in from outside Scotland if you want or you could bring in just very well qualified and well versed teachers to look at it because they're just as able as anybody else to recognise um where the problems lie but they have to be given that explicit instruction to do that because there's no point in just talking around it that isn't going to help we need I believe we need intervention and we need some strong intervention and I think it has to go from the early career all the way through it has to be it has to be all joined up there's no point in looking at it in the nursery provision for example and then hoping that it's okay in primary that that won't work follow-up question was you know how do we keep it continuing is supposing that has a really good presence in grounding in early years but then you know go into primary and the you know the time pressures on the curriculum etc it kind of drops off and also you know given the fact that gender stereotype happens very much in the home in the early years is that always going to be a kind of battle then in that sense you know if if the children are being being taught one thing and the in the home and I don't really expect you to know how to tackle that but it's a wider issue I guess of course it's a wider it's a societal issue and I think society needs to wake up to that I think society needs to take ownership of it and say it's not acceptable and and so if we go to the me too campaign um whether you I mean do I like all of it no I don't like all of it do I think it's what I do like is it's made it it's highlighted and it's made it acceptable to talk about it and so I think we have to make it acceptable or or rather we have to make it not acceptable that there's any bias in the curriculum at all for for our young people because we're not doing anybody any favours with that so I do do I think how do I think that has to be delivered I think there has to be strong leadership shown um and I think we have to um step up to the plate and say this is not acceptable in Scotland um and this is what we're going to do about it and I think Scottish Government to be perfectly honest with you has to take the lead here because if if Scottish Government don't take the lead then um it's going to be much slower however else we do it and I want it to be delivered quickly okay I'm going to put a thing in Ms Biddle and Ms Hayford and then I'll come back to you Ms McGeige I think answering your point I think self-evaluation within schools I think gender bias should be possibly looked at more carefully I I don't see it as as part of kind of self-evaluation within schools as such and I think it would be a really useful tool that schools could use to look at gender bias and talk to children and parents about why they maybe play with certain toys or go to certain clubs and kind of look at that and really look at how they can address those barriers and kind of address that with parents for for example I take my daughter to a young engineers club once a week she's three years old she's only girl that goes out of a group of maybe seven or eight it's all kind of older boys and she does just as well as them because she's three and she's interested in building and she doesn't see it as this is for boys this is so that that's just from my experience as a parent but actually we could be looking at earlier settings and primary schools and saying what are we giving these children what messages are we giving them what messages are parents giving them and evaluating that and looking at how we can build on it missy I just wanted to pick on the point I think as was in the report and we have been working alongside the improving gender bias team are doing an incredible incredibly good amount of work we were one of the pilot schools our nursery was one of the pilot nurseries and that's kind of fed into our schools so you know from what they've expand the government's given more money they've expanded that team and that can only be a positive thing so I think really their work needs to kind of disseminate amongst everyone but I mean certainly within our school we've you know two three years ago when we asked the children I think I said this last time what's an engineer it was Bob the builder with a hard hat now we're getting much more diverse you know diverse and people you know aeronautical engineers and you know the you know female engineer all sorts so I think that and that's certainly because of that work that the improving gender bias team did with it with our school and how it perhaps changed our attitudes maybe some of the language that we're using so anything that can be done to improve what what they are doing I think is it's hugely beneficial miss Perill do you want to I think you touched upon the point of the media and I'm just thinking on the back of what Lorna said about the media portraying the one of the lead scientists that discovered the black hole was a female so is there a role then for the media to be putting more information out there about gender stereotypes that it's not all scientists engineers are not all male not all female you know female there's a whole range of people in different roles that are different genders and kind of breaking that down but the media playing a part in that mr Mickey here touching on the point that Lorna made about you know the education Scotland has now recruited an equalities team each member of the equalities team is linked to our rick so I think there's an again putting my positive hat on there's an opportunity there for us moving forward to make sure that that equalities equalities provision and by equalities I don't just mean gender I think we focused a lot on gender but we've talked about cared for children as well that has to be part of part of the national picture as well and I agree with what Leslie said I think it needs to to come from the top I think we ask our early years practitioners and our primary school teachers to do enough and when you look at what their professional learning priorities are for the next academic year the top thing is pedagogies and teaching approaches to deliver stem learning effectively skills progression in stem subjects and then to use stem as a raise attainment in literacy and university improving quality and equity is number 12 on the list of list of 17 their priorities are sitting elsewhere at the moment rightly or wrongly and therefore having that top level intervention may be the way in which we try to tackle up that particular situation I think we've also got to really look at the role of parents and carers and the general society as well I think grandparents also have quite a large role here from my own personal experiences I'm a big fan of the let toys be toys campaign and I think that's done actually a lot of good work throughout the UK I don't know if people are aware of the campaign but it's basically saying let's not gender toys and asking toy shops and providers to not gender anything including clothes toys so forth and I think the Scottish Government actually could get behind that campaign and actually changed the way that our retailers work in Scotland and that could have quite that could have some impact with parents and carers. Yes, Ms Mackay. It's just a really it's a generic question to Dr Petrie when my son was at school it's just about computing subjects when my son was at school it generally was the boys who took up computing can you tell me how that's levelling out hopefully it has hasn't really it's going backwards it's going backwards on high schools primary schools I think there's hope of the analysis hope there that because computing science is now part of the chrysanthem for excellence and it has been for about five years now for the broad general education we are seeing far more younger people getting really engaged with computing science being really excited about it so my general hope is that when those people get to high school we will begin to see a change but at the moment it's actually going backwards it's gone backwards across the last three years there's actually less girls taking national five higher and advanced higher computing science and there is that issue by what happens if you are undertaking lots of digital schools in your your primary schooling and then you move into secondary school and there isn't a computing science department and increasingly that's what's happening as well so that's another issue that's a big issue actually because say if you're a high school and you're collecting in say 20 primary school feeder schools which is not that unusual of situations especially in war rural scotland you can often have one or two primary schools have been very digitally focused and a lot of work in that area they've got people going into high school really enthusiastically and actually the primary school teachers come back to me and say I had lots of students who wanted to study STEM and they're now bored because they're doing what we did in primary six in high school so it's a real challenge for for high schools thank you very much ms Lamont did you want to come back on that that was covered earlier it was covered earlier I think that that concludes the questions from the committee this morning can I thank all the panellists for coming in it's been really helpful and we really appreciate your contributions to the inquiry yes miss he wanted to add out there was a I'm just reading the papers and there was a question that was suggested that that might be asked that I am it was around did we think there was a point in if you want this interdisciplinary learning approach and actually training teachers to almost kind of be specialist in one particular area and my feeling on that was that yes we should still be doing that because if you want the interdisciplinary learning approach if a teacher's not confident in a STEM aspect of that then so just a couple of anecdotal things that I think might help and I'm doing a primary engineer car challenge with my class at the minute and just to name off some of the interdisciplinary learning so we've got maths in there because they're measuring the wood before they cut it they're working to a budget to buy the resources and it's also social studies because they're talking about the sustainability of electric vehicles and it's science it's forces it's electricity it's literacy it's reporting on their progress and I'm also reading a book boy that harnessed the wind about William Cacwamba in I don't know if you're familiar he built a windmill in Malawi and he spoke a little bit about finding out about how electromagnetism worked in motors and he was fascinated by it so to deepen the understanding because I had the confidence I was able to take a sidestep and this week we were wrapping wire around nails to see how we could get paper clips to stick to a magnet now a teacher who doesn't have that same level of confidence wouldn't have taken that that perhaps sidestep to deepen that understanding so while an interdisciplinary approach is great I still think that teachers still perhaps need the cpd in the training to then be able to make those cross-curricular links just before we wind up we mentioned industry and we know there's some programs out there like the barefoot program that are encouraging people there's other clubs that are funded by industry and this week we're having a debate tomorrow many of the species champions will be involved from the Scottish Parliament I am species champion for the peril border to flotillary and I know the butterfly trust have some projects and they work mainly down in England with schools there have either of our practitioners come across charities and things like that SPB or other organisations that aren't necessarily industry but are there supporting schools? I've had RSBP, yeah PB, have come into schools before to kind of talk to children so I've seen that I haven't had much experience of kind of other charities that have been willing to come in and and do work with children. I mean we've had like workshops from people like the like bee buddies who you know come in and do work so I mean that that was fantastic and wild planet explorers have been in as well and we've done a lot of work although obviously we're paying for these services and bright green hydrogen came in and did a lot of workshops so they are there but I think we were having this conversation again coming back to this equity that the reason why these people came into school was because Laura and I are really driven at seeking out these opportunities and other schools if you don't have somebody who's maybe got that same kind of passion then maybe these opportunities will will pass these by you know these these organisations do publicise themselves but in an inbox that comes in with all these things you know I've had colleagues say oh I just deleted that you know because that's the reality the focus is on perhaps something else so. I'll come back to Ms Biddell again just to say. I was looking at the young workforce and trying to get people in from the arts to come and talk to our children about their jobs and the emails I got back were we don't have funding, we don't have the time, so sort of charities. I think we had one person that was able to come from Youth Theatre Arts but she has dedicated funding in order to do that so. Stem Ambassador Network in Scotland, it's something like 2,600 ambassadors who give up their time to support education and community in Scotland and a superb source for you to make contact with. 17 engineers that we'd sourced from the Stem Ambassador Network come into school and yeah I think that needs to be tapped into because from their point of view actually getting an email from me saying what you come into school means that they're able to meet their cpd requirements for that year so absolutely that's a fantastic resource. I was going to come in specifically on the barefoot computing resource so I'm about to speak slightly against the BCS who I'm here representing which is maybe not good but I'll just be honest and say that resource was primarily developed for the English curriculum first and foremost. It is used a lot in Scottish schools, I know Education Scotland promoted it. I think it's got some great stuff in it, it really does but it might not fit your classroom pedagogy or your classroom's resources because it was developed for a different place. There are lots of really good resources out there and what I'd rather say is us mapping the intended learning outcomes to a wide variety of resources and then allowing the school teachers to choose what fits their curriculum, what fits their interdisciplinarity as well because barefoot is very computing based, computing driven and there's some great resources like I'm a big fan of the Glock Learning Academy which actually comes from Australia but it's far more interdisciplinary so for example there's a great primary school resource where you actually try and diagnose the cat that's got a green nose and you work through programming to try and find out why this cat has got a green nose and what's happened to this cat and it teaches some things about biology and things as well so it's a really interesting way of working so I would say all these resources are great, it's great we have them but one thing doesn't fit all and shouldn't fit all. Can I just echo that I think a lot of the learned societies not only the computing society of course they tend to be UK based and whereas many of them try to tailor what they do for Scotland it's not always there but I do think the learned societies as well as charities have a huge part to play and do try and play their part but to make it sustainable requires resource in my opinion at the school at the individual school level that is what is needed to help take it forward because all these charities and learned societies can help enormously but if there is no buying at the school level through lack of resource then it won't continue and that's where that's very sad. I'm going to bring things to a close then so thank you once again for your attendance this morning. I'm going to shortly go into private session but we will be having a further evidence session our next meeting on the 26th of June so on that basis we'll suspend.