 Yr am tripswys pethau chi Oedden, a nhw'n mynd i gennych chi eich cymaint gweddargylliant i gyngorau cysylltu gydaith, am ddigon i gyd yn hoffi i gyd nid o'r cymysgau eich cymysgau mewn newydd i gyd yn ei gael, ac mae oedd yn cael ei ddysguio i ddau'r ystod. Rydyn nhw'n mynd i'w espudio i chi, mae'n cymaint hwnnw, oherwydd, i gyd yn ei gyd, neu chi gyd yn ei gyd yr oedd o'i gyd yn ei gyd yn ei gyd yn ei gyd yn ei gyd. Os ydym yn yn teimlo'r cyfeissчик o ffocir yw i gael gan ymddiannol o'r tyd Alun Rodd na'i pobl yn dweud. O'r ffordd mythhau aent yn byw'r cygingau ond gan y ddweud yn gennym. Mae'n gweithio'n meddwl i gyllideilig, oedd agerwydd o gweld yn iawn i'n myth. Mae'r gweld yn myth i'n meddwl i fynd i gael'r gyllideilig, a'r gweld i'n meddwl i gael'r gweld yn ychydigwm awmol, a'r fitfyn i fod yn ychydigwm dawnod, potennor yn ddweud. I under takes is miss, including from today's witnesses, and the committee would like to thank all of those who were to contributed to our discussions. We also commissioned spice to undertake a small survey for us of parent's and guardians to inform the meeting. I'm delighted to say that we received over two and a half thousand responses to that survey. And I thank spice for doing that work for us and also for those who responded to the survey. We will obviously be discussing some of the key findings during I welcome, to the committee, Dr Sarah Morton, from the University of Edinburgh, Ian Ellis, MBE, National Parent Forum of Scotland, Jackie Tolland, Parent Network Scotland, Eileen Pryor, Scottish Parent Teacher Council and Shona Crawford, from Western Barter Council. Good morning to all of you. We have quite a large panel. Five members is quite a large panel. I'll say the usual thing that I say. You don't all have to answer every question, but if you have something particular that is different to add, then please indicate. I'll try to come to you, but we're going to move straight to questions because I'm sure we've got a lot of things we want to cover this morning. Can I begin this morning by asking you about the survey that we undertook and your views on it? I just wondered what the witness panel sees as the most significant findings that came out of the survey, if you have a view on that. Eileen? I think that what I would say is that it reflects that those parents who are involved, feel involved and generally have a positive impression of how that engagement works for them. Our biggest challenge, though, is that those parents who didn't respond, and I think that your analysis of the survey is pretty good, that there's a whole lot of parents out there who are not engaged and it's their voices that we're not hearing. Those are the voices that are most relevant to this whole evidence session. Jackie, do you want to add something? Yeah, I think that's most of the parents that we come into contact with are parents that have had a difficult educational experience and they tend to be the ones that wouldn't answer surveys and also if English is a second language or there's literacy issues, it's quite hard to engage them. I think that whilst the findings appear to be quite good, there definitely is a gap, especially the parents that we engage with. Okay, thank you. Anybody else want to add anything? Colleagues, that's everything that I've said. Okay, thank you. Sorry, Sarah. It might be worth thinking in the future about trying to boost the sample in some way to try and select the people who are most relevant to this area or have some focus groups in agencies who are working with those harder to reach parents. I have to say that there are a number of caveats with the survey, not least by which obviously it's a self-selecting group who answer, and I'm sure that the most engaged to who answer these sort of surveys. Excepting that, and the fact that it was rather Edinburgh centric, and in fact, quite large part of the sample was from parents of those whose children go to independent schools. With all those caveats, one of the things that I thought was interesting was that the difference in response from those parents who had children at independent schools in terms of the satisfaction with the information that is provided to them in order for them to support their own children through their education. That was much, much higher than those who attended, children who attended state schools who felt that even though they are obviously parents who are engaged and who want to be involved, there's a much lower rate that they have indicated that they felt that the level of information that they were being provided in order to support their own children, was much lower than it was from an independent sector. I wonder if you have any views on that, given the fact that those are self-selecting groups and those are parents who are engaged and want to be involved, yet they still felt that they weren't getting the information required. You'll see in the evidence review that I'm bringing to the committee today that there's one study that looks at issues around culture. Most teachers are middle-class and white, and the parents who are engaged are also in the same cultural and socio-economic group on the whole, and that presents a real challenge. I think that the fundamental model at fee-paying schools is different, because the parents are customers. I think that in mainstream education parents aren't really seen—it's just a completely different basis for the transaction. I think that if you look at the evidence that we've got, a lot of the good practices coming from outside Scotland and it looks very different from what the dominant culture is here. I think that there's still a sense that parents are maybe seen as a bit of a nuisance in lots of schools. Actually, there's a bit of trying to hold people at arm's length, and we don't have a real culture of, oh, we must keep our parents on side, which, of course, the independent sector schools absolutely have to have. Is that entirely down to the cash? I just think that you're in a different model, aren't you? If you don't keep the parents happy, they feel their paying for this service, which includes that they know what's going on, and they expect their children to achieve very highly. A lot of the evidence shows, doesn't it, that it's about those expectations? As soon as you've got the parents expecting high achievement, you suddenly open up a whole load of other opportunities. That's actually true across—if you take out all of the other factors, so if you control for the other things that we know affects attainment like class, levels of mothers' education, the kind of things that we know affects attainment, if we control for all of those, having a parent or guardian or care involved will raise attainment. It's a fantastic lever that we know works across all of the different groups. I absolutely accept what you're saying, but what I was interested in was the fact that even with those parents whose children attend skate school who are very engaged, who are middle-class, who want to do the best for the children, who want to support their children, who respond to services like that, who are probably on the parent-teacher groups, who are involved in the school, clearly still felt that they were not getting sufficient information in a lot of them to actually support their own children's education. Why would it be that those parents feel that way, given their level of engagement? I can't speak for the independent sector. We don't really operate in there, but I would say that there are a number of factors at play. The primary one is the relationship or the lack of partnership between many schools and their parent group. In our perspective, the education of our children should be a shared endeavour. It is an area that we are both interested in, as parents and professionals. Unfortunately, we are in a culture now where many teachers simply want parents to let them get on with their job and where some parents would say, let the teachers get on with their job. I don't think that that's good enough. The evidence says that we have to be in a shared space supporting our children. As long as we have that divide between us getting on with our job and letting them do what they are supposed to do, we are never really going to get the results that we want from our young people. A lot to say about communication. The main fault suggests that schools tend to broadcast, so they communicate but they are not good at listening. The evidence is really strong that communication between parents and schools is as much about schools listening to parents as giving out information. I think that a lot of it is about how schools find out what parents want and what different groups of parents want and meet that need. Especially in social media ages, it is much easier to send information to everyone, but that may not be what people want. I was just going to say that the state sector is a much more complex picture for the state schools in terms of partnership for parents. It is not the high-achieving parents wanting high achievement for their children as it is in the independent sector. You are having to think about how you engage the different groups of parents in a local primary school, for example, in Western Bartonshire, where you will have a mixed group of parents, some of which you are keen to be engaged and others who will have no confidence to be engaged. You cannot just be offering a one-type of engagement policy or involvement policy. The challenge, if we are really wanting to look at raising attainment, is about trying to engage our most vulnerable, the families of our most vulnerable young people. Those are families who do not have the confidence, who are not sure what they could contribute in schools, who are not confident about coming to schools and who need a lot of time spent in giving them a voice. That is the challenge for our local schools, how they create the time to give the very personal support, often having to go to the home first and foremost, not expecting that parents have the confidence even to come in to school to talk about their young people, but to go and see where they are at in order to encourage them in. I am delighted that you said that, Shona, because, as I was listening to the responses earlier, I had the sense that we were drifting into an area of surprise that there was no more engagement between aspiring middle-class parents and schools for whatever reason. In terms of the attainment gap that we are seeking to address, we seem to have gone off those who are perhaps most in need of that intervention. Is it the panel's view that we need to get the culture right so that it is happening across the board and where, inevitably, it may engage with those whose children are already achieving fairly well before we can then spread that out across the piece, or should we be targeting the efforts to make sure that we address those who are in need of that engagement right now and that that may percolate out more widely? To target those who are most in need, personally, if we want to make a difference in terms of the attainment gap, because I absolutely agree with the panel's view that parental involvement in children's learning is absolutely essential, but we know that the gap is already well established by the time children start school, so we have to be in there much earlier in terms of giving parents the skills and the approaches to support their children's learning, and that is not just a task for schools on their own. I think that there is a role for the schools to be a community hub to engage with parents, but they cannot do it on their own. They do not have the capacity of the time because it is very time-consuming and from a sort of individual teacher or just sort of people point of view, so that you need to have multi-agency involvement in schools if you are going to really reach the most vulnerable and help them to have confidence to support the children's learning. I will butt up against the slight problem that we get in the range of areas where there is a stigma attached to having that support in place because it is seen as other than what is the norm within that school environment. We have done a survey of our own most vulnerable parents in Western Bartonshire, and that is exactly what we found. We have a parenting strategy, which is to roll out parenting support, but parents object to the idea of offering support because that seems to be stigmatising. We are now trying to badge things as opportunities for parents. It might seem a sort of mute point, but I think that the language in which we try to engage parents is very important. By providing the language right and giving opportunities and offering, certainly across the board—and not just targeted but universal support—we are thinking about the needs of our most vulnerable and how we can let them access those opportunities. That is time-consuming, and we need more than teachers working at that. We have to be cautious about focusing all our attention on families and on parents because we are talking about a culture within schools. The survey identified that even those parents who are engaged and are involved do not feel that the communication is as good as it could be. We are talking about a culture shift within our schools. I would say that there is a great deal of work to be done in teacher education, in ensuring that, as our teachers are educated, they also understand the critical role that families play and how to work in partnership with families and why that is important. We are also school leaders because, in our submission, in truth, in some schools you get the sense that parents are a nuisance. Parents are part of the problem, and if only they would do what they are supposed to do, we would get on fine. We cannot continue to work in that way. We cannot continue to work in our two camps. We have to have that shared space where parents and teachers recognise each other's roles and the value that we bring and that it is not simply a case of fixing broken families. That is also about ensuring that the culture within the school shifts to a point where we recognise that shared endeavour. I want to explore some of the issues around consistency. A number of the submissions that have been put forward talk about specific initiatives that aim to improve parental engagement and educational attainment. Specifically, the Western Hills Education Centre has provided useful data that shows it amazingly. It managed to dramatically improve parental engagement so that 90 per cent of parents are attending parent meetings in 2013-14, as opposed to 30 per cent in 2012-13. It is amazing. North Ayrshire Council says that there is no evidence to demonstrate which approaches by schools have been most successful and are being used throughout Scotland. Here we come to inconsistencies, because a number of submissions have highlighted those inconsistencies across Scotland. Concerns have also been expressed as to how well education authorities collect data on what works or what does not work. Is there any evidence to demonstrate what the most effective means of involving parents is? It is a completely mixed bag of anecdote and evidence that is gathered, for the most part, out with Scotland. It has to be said about what difference parental involvement makes and what models work best. We highlighted in our submission that the SPTC is currently starting a programme of taking forward the partnership schools model, which comes out of the United States. The reason that we are doing that is because that is evidence-based. It is based in the University of Johns Hopkins University, which has 30 years of practice and research to back it up. That is something that we are taking forward because we see that as being something that is not just a good idea that we have dreamt up in a dark room of an evening, it is evidence-based. It has been shown to improve partnership with families and to improve attainment of young people. The short answer is, no, there is not, and certainly not, in the Scottish context. You will see from the evidence review that we were commissioned to do, and that it is available for schools to use on a website that the Scottish Government has made available, that a lot of the evidence is not in Scotland, although there are some little bits. The problem is that, particularly when you get down to measures, it tends to be initiatives that are measured rather than a broad strategy, because it is much easier to measure individual initiatives than it is to measure a strategy. There are lots of examples there of the sorts of things people can do, but I think that if you try to think more about how you make it consistent across different schools and different communities, it is better to think what the evidence tells us as a whole. That is much more around what does schools need to do broadly to improve parental engagement, and that is across all of their parents' groups. First of all, they have to understand who those groups are and what those groups want. That needs to be quite nuanced, because it might look different for different kinds of parents and different kinds of needs. There are six dimensions of family engagement that are in the review. If all schools were doing all of those things, you would get some consistency even if they did them differently, so making sure that parents have enough opportunities to understand their child's educational and development needs, collaborating with the community and co-ordinating resources across community groups, providing opportunities for volunteering, making sure that there is good information about learning at home—the learning at home piece is really important not just in primary school but right through school—and the communication piece, which is partly about listening as well as getting information out there and involving parents in decision making. If all schools were working on all of those dimensions in the way that they think would work best for their community, it might look a little different in different places, because we are serving different communities and schools vary so hugely in size and scope. However, I think that that would be one way to start to build in some consistency and also to let people try out some of the different initiatives that look promising and to build an evidence base that is relevant to Scotland around what works. Given that there are, potentially, as you have highlighted, different approaches, why is progress inconsistent? The approaches can be different, but surely we should be seeing some consistency in progress across Scotland. I do not think that we are seeing that. Can I just check something? You have listed the six areas of family engagement that you have just listed. Are these happening? Is this going on now? I do not know that much about what is going on, but I suppose that there is not a policy that says that every school has to have a parental engagement strategy, for example. What does schools feel that they are obliged to do? I do not know. I think that that is something that you would have to find out, because I am not sure. I am going to ask Shona. I would say that some schools are doing those things. I can think of schools in Western Bartonshire, where almost all of those factors can be evidenced in how they engage with parents, whether it is having a big impact on attainment. I think that our data is probably not good, but it is certainly not every school. I think that a lot of schools are attempting that, but I suppose that I will go back to what I said before. It is enhancing the school's capacity to do that, because doing all those things is time-consuming. Getting enough support from the community in order to do that is a challenge in these hard times economically, when we are facing reductions in staffing that could support schools, but certainly those things are happening. Everybody else wants in, so I am going to start with Ian and Jackie in aniline. Just to follow on from some of the stuff, the progress that I would actually say parental involvement is going down rather than up across Scotland. Part of the issue is because of the workload that schools are now having. We are pushing forward attainment. My question back to you is what is attainment? How are we measuring attainment? If you look at all the references that we are looking at just now, attainment has only been measured with qualifications. We need to stop that. We need to stop saying how many hires the kids get. We need to start looking at wider achievement. Insight has got to start looking at tariff scores for the wider achievement. If we start scoring the tariff points properly on wider achievement, the attainment gap will close. That could be a quick hit for you, but the bigger question is what is attainment? What are you measuring? The workload that schools are now doing—one of my schools is a headteacher and two deput teachers who are in class full-time because they cannot get supply. The workload, how can they do parental involvement if they are that busy doing other things in the school? It is all through the budget restraints that we are under. It is prioritising. The big thing just now is attainment. They are taking their finger off the pulse to me on parental involvement because they are bogged down now in attainment. We need to start looking at what is attainment. I attended all the secondary headteacher events that happened across Scotland and presented them. Some of the discussions with headteachers were quite interesting. They are just very concerned that everything has been pushed towards qualifications. I would like to get into the discussion of what attainment is and what do you think attainment is. We have a huge untapped resource in Scotland and that is the parents. There are parents in communities that are absolutely ready to support each other and skilling up those parents to prepare other parents when their kids go to school and help to support them in that transition. They could be parents that are in the community not working for various reasons. They are having breaks in their own employment, just had babies themselves. We have a huge range but they are a huge untapped resource and that is something that we could look at rolling out to support other parents. Two points and one was really picking up on what Mr Beattie said. Why is there not consistency? One reason is because it is not measured, therefore it is not valued. We do not, as part of the HMIE inspection, have any significant review of how a school is reaching out to its parent population. As far as schools are concerned, it comes way down the list of priorities because they are measured on other things. We have to be aware of that. The other thing is that it is interesting that the six means of involving parents are absolutely what the partnership schools programme does. That comes from the partnership schools model that we are rolling out because research shows that, if you engage with families and communities across those six areas, you start to make a difference to how young people do at school. It is still on the same theme. You said that it quite annoyed me that parents who have children go to independent schools are customers. In fact, parents who send their children to state schools also pay our taxes and council tax. Just because we do not hang over a check every month for the school, we are still customers. I get annoyed that there is almost an assumption that parents have not got a voice because they are assumed not to be customers, but they are paying absolutely through the noses. It is the biggest level of expenditure in education. I do not know whether there is any comment, but that is my comment. Let us move on to the questions. I think that that is worth saying. If I have to say it a few more times, it is still worth saying. It should not be assumed that we have not got any rights. It is back to the research point that you made. I get information about how a child is progressing. 85 per cent of independent schools strongly agree or agree that they get that information, 50 per cent of local authority. The school helps me to understand and support my child's education. The independent schools 86 strongly agree and local authorities 50. The point is that it does not cost any money to help to understand the child's education or to give information. I go to Ian Ellis's point. In your submission, you said that a parent was told at the end of the year that their child failed a maths test five times in a row. Why not tell them when they failed at the first time so that they could help? I thought the analogy was about the parent getting more information about the MOT than about their child's education. That is absolutely horrific. On top of that, Edinburgh Council is looking at cutting 1,200 support staff. I look at councils. I cannot think of any better example than what seems to be happening in Renfrewshire. It is not that councils cannot do it. We have a paper here that starts with the early years. It is working with Glasgow and Strathclyde University. My question is what we are asking to identify a child's attainment or lack of attainment. It is not hugely costly. If it is a culture problem, can it not just be overcome overnight? One of the very promising initiatives in the evidence review, which is an internet-based one, is that in some schools they start to publish these test results online. Through the online classrooms, parents are allowed in some place, I think it is Australia, to log in and look at these. That instantly increased parents getting in touch with the school. I presented this to secondary school in Edinburgh. It was interesting because the teacher's reaction to that was, oh, but they would be getting in touch with us and they would be using up our time. The cultural piece, which is getting back to your previous point, is not that state school parents should not feel like they are customers, but that they do not. They are not treated in the same way, because of their less direct, obvious customer model. The thing around attitudes and teachers seeing it is that I was interested in that conversation because it is almost like, well, actually, that parent getting in touch with you might raise that child's attainment in your 10-minute conversation with them more than you can in the whole year. Actually, that is the reality, but that is not the view of the teacher. I suppose, while I do not deny that there is a lot of work to be done and that we do not have consistency, I suppose, I get a bit concerned in knocking the schools, particularly when I know that many of the schools that I work with turn head off their heels to try and involve parents in realistic ways. However, there is not a simple answer. It is about how do you involve the parents many of our schools find that parents do not come into workshops or to hear at parents night, et cetera, but they do come in to see their children perform, so they have lots of initiatives where children are performing or inviting their parents in to see work. They manage to use that activity to inform them a bit better about the curriculum and how they might engage with parents. We have schools that give a lot of free time and evenings to support some of the parenting groups in incredible years, such as the FAS programme, which is a families and schools together programme, which is hugely life-transforming for some of our families in challenging areas. That is something that we do in the evenings and is hugely costly personally to them. I just want to play that, although there is more to be done, the focus should be on looking at those schools that are doing a lot of good work and trying to capitalise on that. I would simply say that, in a way, the segs in very nicely. Can we stop just dreaming up ideas and look at what is working? It is the lack of focus on the evidence base that drives me mad in Scottish education. All those schools all over Scotland are doing bits of good work, and we do not bring that together. We do not focus on what is working. Focus on the evidence base and have a consistent approach. It does not mean that you are doing exactly the same thing, but it does mean that there is a common approach across schools. For many parents, I would say that it would not take a great deal to improve the situation. For those parents who took part in your survey, who are already committed, who are already engaged but do not feel that it is good enough, it would not take a lot to make a change. Therefore, we could focus a lot of energy on those parents where they struggle and schools struggle to engage them. I know that, in Murray, parents who have children in early years in childcare, they can log in every day to see what letter, what word or what not. They can log in every day to see what their child has done at the nursery that day so that they can focus on that letter. I do not know how well-spread that is, but I know that it is part of the care inspectorate's expectations at the end of the year. Murray is a very mixed area between rich and poor. My final question—I will just throw that in, but Jackie, I know that you have an answer. The Audit Scotland report that you have mentioned, there is no consistent means of monitoring or tracking achievement or attainment between P1 and S3. 27 out of 32 local authorities are buying expensive private sector tests—many of them are from England—and there is no comparison at all. What needs to happen to bring forward a level of consistency and identification of a child who is falling behind the class and to support them to keep pace with the rest of the class? What do we need to do to ensure that that gap is identified and addressed? I think that that is another area where there could be a potential barrier, because if you are a parent and you do not have access to a computer and your child knows that other parents are logging in and they say that you are not doing that, that could be a potential, but I think that it is a great idea. I think that it all goes back to confidence. No, it is not a reason not to do it, but what I am saying is that it could be a potential barrier if you are a parent, especially if you live remotely and you do not have access to a computer, but it is going back to confidence for parents to pick up the child. If that was the case, they could just give them a note. Yes, it is just fine. I think that it is just opening up every avenue because there is not one child the same or not one parent and we all learn differently, so it is finding all the different ways of doing it. I think that it is building the capacity within the community so that they then have the confidence to approach the school, because it does not matter if you have all of those avenues, if the parents do not have the confidence, then they will not do it, so we need to find a way of building their confidence and their trust in the relationships between both. The early years is a good place to start. A couple of things. I know that I gave a quite horrific in my response, but we have a rep who actually gets a text every day. It is an app or something that they have in their phone for the teacher who actually sends might your child did this today and they send pictures, then do the week, they get a bigger. There is excellent stuff going across the board too. I know that we have highlighted a few bad things that are happening across the report, but there are really good stuff going on across the country. The thing about how we measure is that we did a working group last year, the sharing and learning assessment document that we produced, because a lot of parents did not know what their kids were during their education. In the old system, the A to E, they knew exactly where they were, but now they do not know what is transwrap by part of the issues. I do not think that there was a transition between teachers as well and not been too sure. I personally do not know what the best thing is. Do we want to go back to testing in S3, testing in P3 or whatever? I do not think that that is what we want. I think that the last committee that I gave was a bit of a controversy, and I am going to give you one here. I personally think that we are teaching our kids to young. We are talking about moving down to primary. We need to realise that our kids are and are teaching them too much too soon. If we start looking at the rest of the world, for they do not, they learn to play with each other. I am going to give you a bit of a controversy. Maybe we need to juggle the system away, because maybe it is not working the way it should work. I personally think that we are teaching our kids too young, too early. At school too young, is that what you say? Yes. What age should start school? I am not going to, I think that it is a discussion that we need to have, but it is possibly six or seven. I am not saying that there should be a system for them. It should be more nursery play-based, but to actually bring them in at four and a half, five and start, and you look at the Scandinavian countries, what they are doing and what they are achieving, and you think that we may be pushing it. It is just when you said that we should start in the early, early years. Alarm will start ringing with me when I start hearing that, because they are young kids. I have two members who want the supplementary, so I want quick supplementaries from each of them before we move on. Liam and then Chick. It was just following up on something that Eileen said before about HMIE, or Education Scotland, not testing on this during their inspections. Education Scotland has the responsibility for providing the support following on from any investigation. Is this something where there is an opportunity to say that one of the ways of addressing the issues that we have identified is through using the examples of parental engagement, through the six strands that are being deployed in many schools, but not necessarily consistently across the board? Should we invite Education Scotland to bake that into their offering in terms of the support for schools? If we are saying that the influence of family is so important, and I think that the evidence is there to say that it is so important in supporting our children to do the best that they can, then it has to be a part of what schools do to support families, to support their children, to work with families to support children and work with communities. It has to be part of the process that HMIEs go through when they are doing a school inspection and post-inspection. It has to be part of the picture. As you say, bake it in. It is just part of the picture. I believe that this is what schools should be doing. It just should be part of it. At the minute, it is a kind of add-on, and we will pick and choose. It is a pick and mix. We will do that, and we will do that, and we will do that, but it should not be like that. That should be an integral part of what every school does to assess their parent population, who are their families, what do we have to do to reach out to those families and to embed this school and what it is doing within its community. Does the committee disagree with that? Education Scotland and HMIE are evaluating that just now, and we are in discussions with them. We think that it is a big internal part that they are missing in the inspections just now, so I am hoping, short-term, that things will start to change. I was going to ask a question, and I will come back to it later, about leadership and the quality of leadership in community. That does not necessarily apply to schools. If I may, I would like to come to Dr Morton, because we are talking about families. In some cases, families have single parents. In your report on page 27, you talked about engaging with fathers. Why is there a lack of, although it seems to have improved somewhat, in your opinion, such a lack of engagement with leadership fathers in the whole parental engagement? That appears to be a major element in developing that currency of aspiration. I think that it is not surprising at all, because most of the people looking after children are mothers or women. It is inevitable if you go to any primary school playground, although times are changing, at least three quarters will be the mothers. It is women on the whole who are caring and doing this work around schools. It is not surprising, really, that we have ended up with many more women engaged than men, although there is a bit of a shift. I suppose that it is important around fathers. There is not an obvious link between who it is that is engaged. It just matters that you have a parent or carer engaged, but for some people that might only be a father, so then you might have to think very carefully about how you are engaging those fathers. I suppose that we should think about fathers in the way that we should be looking across the board for this particular school. Who are the parents that we need to be engaging with and might we want to do something that is specifically aimed at fathers? I would hate to see that becoming the driving, but I think that it is important to include— I am sorry to interrupt you, but again in your report you are saying that the presence and engagement of fathers is positively associated with children's intellectual development, social competence and emotional wellbeing. There is not a comparator of mothers. There is nothing you can compare. That is true of a lot of the research around different mothers or fathers. There is quite often not a comparator, so if you look across the evidence as a whole, as long as you have got a parent engaged, it does not matter, but when they have looked at children who do have fathers engaged, then there is some positive effect, but it is very hard to measure that against parents who do have a mother engaged. There is not an equivalent piece of research. The research around gender is quite complicated to interpret, but we were asked specifically in this review to look at fathers and it is something that parents should be— that if schools are going to be starting to strategise around this and think about how they are engaging parents, of course they have got to have different kinds of parents in mind, and that means thinking not just about mothers but about fathers as well. It is easy for us to focus on early years and primary schools. Actually secondary schools, I do not know if you saw, actually since this evidence came in, there was a report in the paper last week of a study in England showing that even children who are doing relatively well at 11 fall behind the least advantage, fall behind massively during the secondary school years. It is really important to keep secondary school in mind here as well. Jackie, do you have a quick comment? The evidence is opening out, the support that families have, because it could be a grandparent as well, an aunt or an uncle. It is looking at the family dynamic and who is the best person, because it could be that the parents do have to work full-time when they can always make it. It is about the schools, I guess, researching what that family is made up of and who is the best person to contact to support that child, so it is not just about parents. Workload has been touched on briefly in previous evidence sessions as well, representatives of teachers have spoken about the really high workload and demands on their time just in the class. Is it actually possible for classroom teachers to make parental engagement a priority? If so, how do we then move teachers on to treating it as a priority rather than hands-off to keep out the classroom and let me get on with my job? I would simply say that if we are all agreed that teachers and parents want the best for their children, that is not a competition. If teachers were more effectively engaging their parents, it would actually make their job easier. If we engage more effectively with families and kids were there more, so there was less absenteeism, the kids would do better. It would make teachers' jobs easier. There is a whole load of things that parental involvement can influence, which will make a teacher's job easier and will improve the attainment levels of the young people and therefore give that positive feedback to schools that they are achieving more for their young people. Again, we cannot look at this as something that is a bolt-on. If we do this well, it not only impacts on outcomes for young people, it makes schools a better place to be, a more welcoming place to be, and the kids who go there go more regularly, attend better to their classes and do better. It is a win-win. Things have changed over the years. If I actually go back to pre-Dumbland days and I hate to bring that up, but back then you could approach teachers when your kids were going into the school. Since Dumbland, in a third school still use it, it is very hard to get to teachers now. You have to go through head teachers to get to teachers. That bit of personal relationship has actually dwindled quite a bit after that. It is very hard now. If you want to see a teacher, you have actually virtually got to get an appointment. We used to be able to do just a quick two-minute discussion before the day started or after the day started. It is very hard to get to the teacher. As I said earlier, the workload is now vast. If they cannot supply staff, there is no spare time to go in during the day to release a teacher. It is very hard to engage now. A presentation to trainee teachers about how to engage parents. The feedback that we got was that they found that was really useful. It is not something that they thought about before, but when we went and we spoke about that, they found that it was something that they could probably use. Maybe in preparing parents and children for school, we could start to prepare teachers for engaging with parents. I think that the enactment of the Children and Young People's Bill with GERFEC and where children and families are at the centre of all the planning has required us and local authorities to be addressing the training of teachers and helping them to have methods of really putting children and families and parents at the centre of all the planning. I think that that should have an impact on the dialogue that teachers and parents have together because they will be planning together. Is it your view that the rolling out of the provisions with the Children and Young People Act, particularly the focus on GERFEC, is or will have an impact in this area? Yes, I absolutely agree with that. Part of it is also selling to teachers what parental engagement can achieve. It is not just the better exam results and higher retention rates, but it is also pupils behaving better, attending more regularly, adapting better and having better networks. Part of it is really winning them over to that idea, and the evidence is really clear that there is a lot of benefits. We are talking again about a culture change and trying to move people on to thinking differently about what the relationship is. We touched on training there in North Ayrshire Council and particular had suggested local authorities invest in training for teachers, particularly around parents' evenings, so that they are a valuable exchange so that teachers know exactly how the child develops and their behaviour at home and parents know exactly what they need to go away and work on. Do you agree that that is a crucial part of parental engagement, or are there any other particular issues that schools need to address around engagement? I do not agree that a five minute interview with a teacher is sufficient to achieve all of that. It simply is not. If you are going to have a change in thinking, a change in the way that parents support their children, a change in the way that teachers and parents work together to support children, you are not going to achieve that in five minutes. I am not saying that that should not be done because it helps, but it is such a tiny part of what should be going on that we really have to get that into perspective. I also make another point that a group of youngsters that we are forgetting in this discussion and who are actually the most in need of support are those who are looked after. Those are the children who are most vulnerable in our schools and whose attainment and achievement levels are at their lowest, and yet they do not have the benefit of parents at home who are going to get involved or who potentially could get involved. We have to capture somewhere the fact that we have to have some mechanism, we have to have support for youngsters who are looked after, to ensure that—I heard someone saying that every child needs somebody who is mad about them. That is absolutely true. All our kids need someone who is mad about them. I am mad about my kids, and the kids who are looked after tend to lack that adult who is mad about them. We really have to make sure that somewhere we insert that within the system when we have an adult who is mad about a youngster and the youngster is equally mad about them, and that adult takes on that role. I call on speed dating, because that is all you do. You race special in secondary school, you race round from one to the other. The big thing about parents night is that teachers need to tell you negative. They say that they are just trying to tell you positive things. If there is something not working, as in what I said earlier, there are failed five maths tests, tell us early. Do not wait until the end of term. I have been in that situation as a parent's night turning up in June to be told bad news about my daughter. That happened six months ago. Teachers need to be able to say, do you need to do stuff? That is what is happening. Instead, they are just trying to show you the good things that your child is doing in the class. You are talking about training, but we did a big thing with the Strathclyde university. We went to the fourth year students because I just happened to get into conversation with them. It was a day of different seminars that they ran. The parent seminar was the busiest seminar of the day because they were quite scared of what they were going into with parents. I think that there is work to be done with teacher training to bring in real parents to talk to them. They go into a school and have not got this thought in their head that parents are going to come in. As parents, we are just as scared as teachers. We just want the best. As Eileen said, we want the best for our children. What we need to emphasise to teachers is that they are pleased to tell us the negative as well as they are good. That would lead to a huge difference to parental involvement. Just to be personal for a moment, perhaps parents would be more involved if parents nights did not start at four in the afternoon and finish at six, which makes it quite difficult for a lot of parents to actually even get there at all. That has made us a personal bugbear when I mean it. Chick Grory. Yes, just if I may pull up on that, we will talk about something that has to be done. There are four words that come to mind. One is leadership. One is community. One is identity. The last one that Ean referred to is communications, which I think has to be, as he indicated, not just all the positives and has to be, of course, underpinning all the training. Do we have the leadership in the schools or among the parents to drive the agenda that we are looking at? In some cases, yes. I think that there are some schools that are doing great work and which do have the leadership, but unfortunately they are out there working on their own. For all, we talk about it a lot. We do not do a good job of sharing what is working. It is the job of Education Scotland to capture the good stories and to share the good practice. That is what Education Scotland is about. They are working at it, but I think that we are still not very good at it. There is some good leadership, yes, absolutely, but there is also some pretty rotten leadership, I am afraid. Where parents feel excluded and where the leadership of the school does not bring them in. I keep going back to the survey that you did, even those parents who want to be and who are actively turning up at meetings and so on do not feel as if, really, the communication is good enough. I think that we have a long way to go. Forgive me for interrupting. We talk about leadership and the dominance of the school in this, and we are still trying to encourage the parents—I do not know if Ian has a view on that. There must be leaders among the parents. I can remember having a colleague of mine having a conversation, and it was with Government officials. It was about a particular piece of legislation, and she said that if there was a lawyer on the parent council, they would run rings around this, and the response was that there are lawyers on parent councils. Yes, because the parents who go to parent councils are all sorts of things, but it is that sort of sense of not understanding that the parent body has capacity as well. They are, at the minute, very much passive recipients of information. They are not partners, and so the information is sent out to parents and they are supposed to consume that and respond. What we need is a partnership where there is dialogue and exchange and where there are agreed outcomes, not simply parents being told what to do. What about the identification aspect? In community, building that community feeling, I will come back to that in the independent schools of May later. I know that Dr Mottam wanted to respond to your first question. On the How Do We Share Good Practice question, Education Scotland and the Scottish Government commissioned a review on a website called engagingwithfamilies.co.uk and invited schools to add to it with their own examples of good practice. Last time I looked, that had not seemed to have happened much, so there may be some communication strategies around it. Also, as part of it, there is a parental needs assessment sheet that is encouraging schools to think about how they assess parental needs. Those are produced by children in Scotland and also some guidance to thinking about community assets. So there are some tools there for sharing and learning that schools do not know about. We have just heard about some parents and disadvantaged families who do not have PCs or laptops. There may be leaders among that part of the community that we have not tapped into. The other thing is not having access to IT. Of course, some schools are rolling out IT projects where every child gets a device and they have quite a good evidence base around increasing parental engagement, particularly in those families where that becomes their only way of accessing the internet. That is one approach that is being used certainly in quite a few areas at the moment. In terms of leadership in schools, although I agree absolutely with Dr Morton about the advent of IT systems and how that can improve sharing of practice, most of the headteachers that I know of read their emails and get on to their computers at night as they are having their cup of tea before going to bed, because that is the first time that they have the opportunity to do that, because the life of the school takes over. I think that we have to be realistic in our aspirations about what schools can achieve through IT and accessing and putting good practice up, etc. They would absolutely endorse that, but again it is the reality of time. The big issue is leadership, to be honest. The stories that I can tell you are different stories per a school who had a tremendous parent council were really active. The headteacher left, the new headteacher in and the parent council virtually finished, but I have seen it the other way about where a new headteacher is going and the parent council is absolutely flourished. The key thing is that the leadership has got to be a relationship between the parent council and the headteacher. The headteacher, in theory, has got to want it, because even if it does not matter how many parents want that relationship, if the leader of the school does not want it, you will never crack it up. The leadership does not necessarily have to come from the school, it can come from within the community. If the head does not want it, you will never get it. You will never get a partnership in the school. It has got to be, I would not say led, but it has got to be a partnership. If the headteacher does not want it or puts obstacles in your way, it does not matter how many parents want it, you will never crack it up, because you need the support. I quote Celsus, who is quoting the UK Department for Education Research, who said, where there is effective parental involvement, the single most important factor was found to be the enthusiasm of the headteacher. I assume that you agree with that. If you engage with parents in the community, the relationship has to start somewhere and build on that, but it is a two-way process between the community and the schools, but it has to be a relationship and it has to be equal. That is the issue where the power dynamic is in balance. If you turn that on its head and you bring out the headteacher into that community group and start to change the power dynamic if they are up for it, that could be a way forward. I would like to ask a couple of questions, but I initially go on Ian's point about leadership and pernights in particular to good news and bad news, because from my own experience as a parent, my son had learned difficulties and I kept getting told how nice a boy he was. I used to say, I know that, he takes after his father. I was not there to find that out, but I wanted to know how he was doing academically. We have heard in evidence when we visited the Western Hills education centre that there was leadership there from a headteacher that took that on, and things have improved, but they had to break things back down to basics. They had to teach teachers to teach instead of processing pupils. I found that interesting and we are talking about the real world and we can see how the success was happening. I wonder what your views were on that. The point that you make is that where teachers are struggling to really get their heads around, what can this young person achieve and what can I say about this youngster? They will focus on the personality, very nice youngster. I know that. I think that that is not an uncommon experience, but that comes back to this thing about how we are talking about achievement, attainment. I know that this is something that Ian talked about earlier, and I agree that parents have pretty straightforward requirements from a school. They want their child to be happy, they want them to be looked after, and they want them to do the best that they can. If that means that they achieve six and two advanced hires, that is the best that they can, but if it means that they turn up at school every day and are willing to learn to participate in the school community and get a few N4s and N5s, I was going to say standard grades, but if they get a few N4s and N5s, if that is the best that they can do, then parents will be happy with that, but it is that thing about the best they can be. Because schools see academic attainment as the standard by which they are measured, if a youngster is not going to achieve those five hires and two advanced hires, they struggle to say that this youngster is doing really well, he is doing the best that he can, and he is going to do brilliantly at this and this and this. It is about changing the nature of the dialogue, is it not? That attainment is not everything, it is about the wider achievement and the wider participation in the school community. I couldn't agree more. I think that that is very evident in a lot of the schools now that they are celebrating the wider achievement and there are all sorts of outdoor activities, forest schools and nurture groups to meet the needs of the wide variety of children that we have. The challenge for schools is getting parents to understand the benefits of all the different activities because some parents are still very focused on the exam results. That is just another barrier to the communication that we have talked about, but I certainly agree with everyone's comments about building that relationship being crucial. I agree with what Shona has said. We talk about education to our children, but there is a lot of work here that we need to do towards our parents and not just our parents. We need to educate you guys ministers, we need to educate local councillors to try to change the mindset. It is not all about qualifications, the wider achievement. Again, when I spoke at the leadership events across the country, what I said was that it is great that the kids are achieving, but we need to look at what they are achieving. Are they achieving the best, as Aileen said, the best that they can achieve? In a child, I hate to say it, and then one, two or three or four, that is an achievement for that child. It is the same as an achievement, as Aileen said, a child getting advanced hires and hires. That is their achievement, but we need to look at the wider picture, but we need to educate parents. When I was at school, everything was about qualifications. My child who has just went through, why my children who have just went through school, that is obvious. I was concerned about what a qualification we were, and somebody said to me, when will this actually change? Unless we educate the parents and everybody else in the country, employers and everybody, the only time that it will change is when my daughter has her child at school going through that, because that is her experience. I think that there is an awful lot of work to be done to educate others, apart from our children, in the school. It is also about expectations. The powerful thing that a teacher can do is raise a parent's expectations of their child. The teachers are already going to have a sense of, oh, we expect you to do this or that, but when teachers have low expectations, particularly for those who are at least likely to attain well, they are going to just reinforce a parent's attitude. Whereas if the teacher says, oh, we expect him or her to do this, then you can actually start to pull in parents' expectations of that, and that is the really powerful combination. Sorry, George. Is that a very specific question? One of the things that we have discussed before, I think that Ian referred to in the MPFS paper, how much distortion does the focus on academic qualification play in terms of parental involvement vis-à-vis vocational qualifications? Sorry, could you clarify your question? In terms of, we've heard for years that you have to go to university, university, university, and that creates a culture of, this is what we mean by attainment, when, in fact, in previous sessions we've talked about, we need people to do, who are not necessarily a potential university student, but are very, very capable and can attain a much greater contribution through the vocational route. How much does that distort the whole attainment spectrum? I think hugely that is what I just said when my last statement was, we need to educate people. There's a tremendous thing that children out there are doing and achieving, but they're not going to qualification. But if you look at what different authorities are doing, there are stories that I could tell you that there are children out there who are getting into college without the qualifications that they should be having. They should actually need to get into that course because the authorities actually worked with the college and these children have moved on. So there's more than one way to get into college and into university and it's just been, it's all a bit education and we do need to actually look at the wider achievement and that's when insight comes into it, but we need to score it properly. I was just going to say that there's a generation of parents, and I'm one of them, who's seen their youngsters going through school, aiming for higher, going to university, getting their degrees and then nothing of value. We have been told a story about the golden ticket that is the degree and it is not a golden ticket. So, you know, there is a dialogue to be had around creating realistic expectations for young people and actually providing them with the support to do the best they can to move in the direction, the career direction they want to do and whether that's academic or vocational doesn't matter. I would make the point that the most prized academic degrees are absolutely vocational because you become a doctor or you become a lawyer. Well, if that's not vocational, what is? So I think we have to change the narrative about vocational and academic. Can I ask about parents with greater needs? You know, we've talked about it in some detail, but how do we get to them? It's been interesting some of the things that's been said so far because it's not all about the school, it's about the third sector, it's about other organisations. I was interested in what Shona said about the fact that some schools are accessing parents through plays or drama or culture or sport or various things like that. Also, Jackie Tone said about the fact that some parents are coming from difficult educational backgrounds themselves. Now, some of the evidence we've already had, the SPTC said that in many cases the third sector and external funded projects play a significant role in taking forward this work rather than the school itself. I'd like to explore that more because would it not be easier for these parents to access that type of thing as opposed to the school themselves if they have their own emotional baggage that they've had from the time at school? Shona? We've got a very interesting project just now that is linked with action for children, where they have been engaged with and training parents to be buddies of other parents so that they have, you know, schools have asked action for children to link up some of the more needy parents or parents that have the most stresses in their life with volunteer parents who can help them do just the sort of ordinary things that they perhaps lack the confidence for doing, you know, playing with their children, taking them to appointments, coming into school, engaging in some of the parenting opportunities. That has been a huge success, I mean a very small project I have to say, but a huge success in terms of both the parents who volunteered because many of them have gone on and got extra qualifications as a result of that volunteering and also it's allowed schools to find a way to bring in parents that are perhaps furthest from mainstream services. The labelling that we actually use about needy parents and vulnerable parents, we can all be needy and vulnerable at any point in our lives, but the parents that we engage with, it is that whole, our whole ethos is parents for parents, so there's a bit of equality there when they come along to an organisation or a group, they know that it's other parents, who are further down that journey, further down that road, they've had some training, but they know that it is a journey and ultimately the end of it, they want the confidence to be the best parent that they can be for their child and that's what draws people to organisations that support them because they know that they need that and they know that they've got that vulnerability. I was talking to someone the other day that we're talking about areas of multiple deprivation and if people are growing up, kids are growing up hearing that about the place that they live in, I was brought up in from chapel, I didn't know that I was living in an area of multiple deprivation, I had a great childhood, so if people are hearing that story and those labels then they grow up with that mindset and I think that's something that we really could change. George, you okay? I agree with Jackie because the labels that we do use are important because my childhood from Ferguson Park in my constituency doesn't grow up thinking that they're in an area of deprivation and I think it's important that we do, to be very careful on how we deal with these. The areas themselves have got challenges, the people just happen to be there so it's like structural stuff that has to change. You have to get it right? I'm really pressed for time, Eileen Chick. Just on the independent schools, the so-called contract, is there any point or possibility or benefit from replicating that in the state schools? I think there is something to be said about how do we raise parents' expectations around engagement because we've been focusing quite a lot on schools and what they can do and so the community group is one but there might be something more on the population-wide in terms of well actually you should be involved, the norm should be that you're involved because the thing that you come up against again and again is well actually we provide these opportunities, the people who are interested come and so that's good enough so it's almost like trying to raise parents' expectations about what involvement might look like from their point of view and the sorts of things that help in the home environment around learning and learning support and maybe trying to change minds in the population in general as well. Yeah, I certainly agree with that and I was certainly hoping with the increase in the early years hours that there would be built into that some sort of expectation. I know a lot of it is about enabling parents to get off to work but for many of our parents they're not in working but I would like to see the expectation of them becoming involved with their child in nursery. Yes, engage and yes, have the extra hours but come in and join the nursery staff in engaging with their children and start that learning journey in order that we can address that attainment gap that we know starts in the early years. I'm quite interested in the legislative changes that have happened from 2006 of the parental involvement act and a number of submissions spoke about the mixed review of that act if we're being polite about it. Renfrewshire Council said that there's no evidence that parental involvement alone raises attainment and therefore speaks to the act. The Poverty Alliance reported mixed views but highlighted one comment that the parental involvement act is actually widening in the qualities as more confident parents took control while others were pushed aside and in the SPTC's evidence it said in our experience the level of support being provided at local authority level to parents and parent groups through parent officers and similar has declined significantly over the years since the parental involvement legislation was enacted. Do you really have to get your views on that first before we have a discussion further? Of course that certainly in Audit Scotland produced figures on this. The number of parental involvement officers and the amount of time that they have to support parents and parent groups has diminished significantly over the years. There is no evidence about the impact of the legislation and I would say that that's a big one at the minute. I think that we actually do need to have some research done to see what change has that made. We work with parent councils and parent groups up and down the country. We've got people out most nights of the week during term time working with parent councils. The thing that we say to them is A, how do you represent all of your parents? And B, how do you communicate with and involve all your parents? It doesn't mean having them round the table because that's not practical. How do you do that as a parent's group? I would say that those are the two big challenges that parent councils have. As an organisation we're really the only folk at the minute other than the one or two parent officers who are out there. We're the only folk who are helping them to do that. Why is that declining in your evidence that you gave? You said that it had gone backwards since that act came into force rather than the opposite way that you would have probably thought in 2006 would happen. The level of involvement from parent officers? Yes. It's quite simply because local authority budgets have been squeezed, people have been removed from posts or given lots of additional duties. They may hold the title parental involvement officer but they also deal with homeschooling, they deal with complaints, they deal with consultations, they deal with a hundred and one other things. The amount of time that they have to support parents and parent groups has shrunk right back to the point where it's almost negligible in some cases. How representative do we think parent councils are on that? Ian, you spoke about in order for the ethos in the school to work. The head teacher has to be directly involved regardless of the will of parents. Do you find, anecdotally or otherwise, that parents say if the parent council doesn't sit on that, that they'll do the work and the rest of us can sit back and watch for that to happen or how do they get involved with that? It varies so much across the country. It's down to relationships with how much your parent council want to do. Some parent councils all they want to do is just go along and listen to what the head teacher has got to say. Other parent councils will want to go and look at the improvement plan or the development plan that we want to call for the school and actually how can we take that forward? How can we then get other parents involved? It varies so much across the country, but I totally agree with what Eileen is saying about the parental involvement officers and authorities. They are very few and far between now. I think that some of the submissions say that 40 per cent of their time—I reckon that some of them will be lucky if 10 per cent of their time is actually spent in parental involvement now. There's one authority that, indeed, has got a dedicated parental involvement officer. She is very active out there and there's some really good things going on in them. You talk to directors and you say, why can't we replicate this across the country? As Eileen said, it's all a bit budget, it's all a bit money. They cannot afford to put that as they see, but if they want to take it seriously, and if some of the reports are true that parental involvement can and I personally think it can help raise attainment, then if they are serious about it, they need to do something more locally as an authority-wide on parental involvement. We had a discussion earlier about those parents who are probably more active in certain areas during the middle-classy and various other things. Again, this is just maybe a view borne out of no evidence, but those in parent councils are those who have the confidence that they are in positions in their working life and think, okay, I can articulate that message, I'll get involved, whereas those parents who didn't have a good schooling, didn't have that experience, sit back and don't think that they can be involved in that. I mean, is that fair to be saying that? I would say yes and no to be honest with you. There's some schools in very highly deprived areas that work that parent councils are doing is absolutely spectacular. It's actually that it puts a lot of schools with well-to-do parents to shame in the work that they are doing, so yes and no. Just on that point, no, sorry. I mean, if the school is in a deprived area, so the school that I went to would probably be in that, but the parent council would have been made up of parents who weren't necessarily themselves from a deprived background, so I find that, you know, it might be working in a deprived school, but are they parents? Yes, I'm talking about schools, I'm talking about parents, who've actually come from. And it comes down to leadership. The parents that are involved in the parent teacher councils will already be engaged and the parents and the community. It's building that bridge between the both of them and preparing them for that transition into a parent council, and I think that's where we could focus on. So if you can build the confidence, because if they're not engaged in the school, then they don't know how to make that step to the parent teacher council. So it all comes back to the confidence, changing their mindset and opening the door, and again changing the power dynamic, because it's always having to go into the school. There has to be a wee bit coming the other way to show that it is a two-way process. I could try that. And just finally, Linda, do you think that legislation is needed to close the attainment gap? The bill that has come through, or come into the committee recently, is that it's very interesting to see attainment gap in there, and as I've heard, the devil will be in the detail, but my perspective is that what I would like to see is that the guidance that sits behind the bill actually puts the onus on local authorities to use evidence-based practice that is commonly shared to achieve what we've talked about this morning, to achieve some sort of consistency of approach across local authorities, because we don't need more initiatives. We're absolutely within Scottish education. I think that we're initiatives out, so let's use what's happening, what's good, what we know works, and apply it consistently, rather than 32 local authorities all going off in different directions and doing different things again. Thank you, Lee McArthur. Thank you. I thought Dr Morton's body language there in response to the question, do we need legislation to achieve this? It was very eloquent. I mean, I've been struck that, over the course of the last hour and a half, we've been slightly schizophrenic in our discussion of raising attainment and then closing the attainment gap, which clearly are two separate things. I'm struck that that schizophrenia is not limited to this committee. The Education Scotland bill that we'll be considering shortly talks in the policy memorandum of the Government's commitment to help make Scotland a fairer, more equal place through improvement of education attainment for all, and then the start of the bill, the preamble to the bill, talks about the Scottish Parliament imposing duties in relation to reducing pupils' inequalities of outcome. Are we in danger of getting drawn into aspiring to have everybody above average or some kind of trickle-down attainment economics, where if we focus on raising attainment for everyone, it will benefit those who are perhaps most in need. I notice Ian that, in keeping with your attempt to be controversial, in the evidence suggested that you agree with Audit Scotland's view that spending should be targeted on the parents, pupils and schools that need it the most. The focus should not be on raising attainment for all, as this will continue to raise the bar while not addressing the equity gap. I'd be interested to know whether we are in danger of spreading ourselves across two almost mutually contradictory objectives here. I mean, this is more of a reflection than what's necessarily explicitly in the evidence, but it would seem that there's some really good practice going on in schools that are targeted in areas where they know they've got a high level of need and they have to get out of the door, and they have to work really hard to involve parents. I suspect that maybe some of the risk is more in the big mixed schools, where it's actually easy to get some parents in the door, but they'll always be a cohort who are never appearing. Actually, for those schools, they can say, oh, look, we've got 75% of the parents are coming to parents' evening, but actually the 25% are not the ones who would probably benefit most from some interaction. They're not completely mutually exclusive, and I suppose what Ian was saying about, you see some middle-class parent councils that are doing really badly. Actually, they're probably also in those really mixed schools, because it's easy for them to be on a parent council, and they don't really feel that they have a duty to try and involve everybody. So I think maybe a nuanced approach around trying to think about, we know that parental engagement will benefit every single child, so we should be thinking about it across the piece, but then there will be some targeting that will suit different kinds of schools in different ways. Priority, and we've heard, I think, Shona, you talked earlier on about the time, and I suppose the financial resource that could be involved, particularly in helping those, whether it's looked after children that Eileen mentioned, or others who may need that additional support. If we don't prioritise or we prioritise everything, then nothing is a priority. Should we be more ruthless in saying, yes, this will benefit the school environment as a whole, but actually trying to address that gap rather than simply attainment as a whole is the priority that we should be focusing on? Well, I think that if we want to close the attainment gap, we absolutely have to target resources with our lowest performing 20 per cent, but I would think that anything that we do with that lowest performing, whether it is in terms of relationship building with families, or in terms of the methodology and pedagogy in schools in terms of teacher skill, is going to benefit all. I think that we do need to think very clearly about what the evidence base programmes are, and, as I said, there are a number around, but they are costly, and we need to target resources there if we want to close the gap. We have to look at the piece of study. The biggest difference is within the schools, not between schools in Scotland. You can't look at individual schools and say, we'll target that one and then we'll not target that one, because there are massive differences within individual schools, and the parent population and the families involved with those schools. My sense is that we have to start with a universal approach, but be prepared to put in additional funding for specific projects or programmes where there is a clearly identified need. To make it clear, I certainly recognise the gap within schools as much as between schools, but, again, it's still there if you're not prioritising, and we see this with a survey. In a sense, a self-selecting group will say that the engagement with parents isn't great amongst us, and we want that engagement. The danger is that you get sidetracked into trying to deal with that, rather than dealing with the most fundamental problem, which I think you yourself identified at the beginning, Eileen, is that you haven't actually heard from the ones who you most need to hear from and where most support is probably needed. Is that fair? Can I just follow up on that? The recent announcement by the Scottish Government of the £100 million attainment fund is targeted at seven local authorities, I think, from memory. Is that the kind of thing that you're talking about that should be done, or is there something more of that? We'll find its way into programmes, specifically focusing on parental engagement with schools. Yes, but my point is that it's not a universal, it's not a fund that's going across every local authority, every school. It's specific to those areas where there is the least advantage, if you like, if you want to put it that way. Just a couple of things on that. What's the money going to get used for is my question. Yes, it's great, any bit of money that we put out there to help education, yes superb, but at this moment is that £100 million, the £20 million that's just been shared amongst the seven authorities. Does the Government know what's that actually going to be used for? Should we not have done a wee bit of work to see what we're actually going to use that money for first and foremost? We can all probably share examples of good practice that our pilot projects that's been on across the country that we have made a huge difference, but it's not sustainable across the country. If you put in the resources we can do it, but my question to Liam is, I'm going to ask him a question back. What gap are we closing? What are we measuring to close that gap? Again, back to what I said earlier, what are we going to measure on attainment? What is attainment? What gap? If we start, we need to look at what are we actually trying, what gap are we trying to close? Is it the gap for qualifications? What gap is it? I don't know and I'm a parent and I'm chair of a national body and we don't know what gap we're actually trying to close. We just hear we want to close the attainment gap. What are we talking about attainment? I think we actually need to clarify what we're actually calling attainment and then how are we going to close the gap? In response to that, I think there's a general acceptance that a wider perspective on achievement is certainly desirable, but I think also it's recognised that that gap is being borne out in life outcomes in terms of positive destinations post school, whether that's through further training at college, whether it's job experience or whatever it may be. I think that that's the gap that is being addressed rather than whether or not you want everybody to be aspiring towards five fighters, which I don't think anybody really is hungry. Compact to hearing that in the positive achievement. It will be very quiet. How do we record things then? I mean, I can tell you, a child attending college for half a day a week is called positive destination. I don't think that a half day a week at college for a child is a positive destination, so we need to look at what we're actually recording. I don't dispute that. Following up the convener's question in relation to the attainment fund, I mean clearly this has been targeted in seven different areas, but there are going to be pockets of poverty. There's going to be attainment gaps in the other 25 local authority areas. Are we in danger of taking an approach that says that this, by our measure of multiple deprivation, looks like a sensible policy? In terms of treating each child as an individual, we're not going to make the headway that we need to make. I think that the University of Scotland identified 70 per cent of those who live in the poorest households who actually don't fall within that SMID 20 measure, so we've actually spent quite a bit of money not really targeting this in an appropriate fashion. Is that fair? Okay, thank you very much for that. I pass on the thanks of the committee for your attendance today. It's been just over an hour and a half, so I think that we've given that a reasonable crack at that subject, so I very much appreciate you coming along and giving your time today. We are obviously in the middle of an inquiry into this attainment. Whatever the attainment gap might be, Ian, I think that we are endeavouring to look at it and hopefully try and accomplish some suggestions to resolve it. As the committee has agreed to hold the next items in private, I now close the meeting to the public. Before I do so, just for the sake of clarity, I should point out that Mark Griffin will not take part in the discussion at item 5. We will consider the approach to our stage 1 report on the BSL bill, because he obviously has the member in charge of the bill, but he will be here for the other items on the agenda that are being taken in private. Thank you very much, and I close the meeting.