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We have quite an extensive panel this morning. My questions begin with you, carol. Allow you to introduce yourself and tell us a wee bit about your organisation. Before I get iddyn nhw. Welcome back, and to hollywood. It's nice to see you here, but you're at the opposite side of the table this time. I've already wandered to be gentle with you. Thanks very much. I think that I wasn't quite prepared to go first, so I have not fully collated my thoughts. I understand what you're doing today is scoping what the committee might want to do around about prejudice-based bullying in schools. We definitely welcome that at the Coalition for Racial Quality and Rights. We would love to see some more work done in this area. You may be aware that the Scottish Government is preparing to release its refreshed national approach on bullying. Our opinion is that that could possibly benefit from a pause before publication in order to allow the committee to do some additional investigation into this, whether it be a full-scale inquiry or some discrete pieces of work. We do not really believe that the evidence base is good enough to enable meaningful policy development in this area at the moment and the fact that there has been no involvement through the process of race equality-focused charities is a serious concern to us. We are not aware of any disaggregated or targeted engagement with minority ethnic communities either. Considering that, teachers have reported that bullying based on race is the number one type of prejudice-based bullying that they are aware of happening in their schools. We really think that there needs to be some more work done to look at that. Another focus for us, which links again to the national strategy, is around developing a more coherent national approach to recording and monitoring of prejudice-based bullying in schools. It is very difficult to build up the kind of information that you need about what is happening in schools without a national approach. That is something that has been recently recommended to the UK, for all its states, to put into place by the committee that was examining the UK on its compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination. We feel that it is important that respect for all Scotland's revised national approach to anti-bullying takes into account those important factors. We hope that whatever questions the committee may pose will include looking at those factors. Can you tell us for the record, Carol, what your organisation is and what it does? If everybody can do that, it just means that it is on the record as to who is here. The Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights is our Scottish national anti-racist charity. We work at a strategic level to combat racial inequality, primarily looking at Scotland's structures, both political and through the public services. We are a very small team of only five people, but we work at a national level. We are co-funded by Glasgow City Council to do anti-racist work within Glasgow. I am Ian Smith, from Inclusion Scotland. Inclusion Scotland is the national network organisation for disabled people's organisations. Those organisations are run by disabled people themselves. We have regularly raised concerns about the public attitudes and stigma against disabled people that has led to a rise in hate crime and harassment against disabled people in recent years. We believe that disability bullying and harassment is under-reported in schools because there is no systematic recording of disabled-based bullying in the school system. They tend to be dealt with as individual bullying incidents and there is no pattern across Scotland, no guidance across Scotland as to how to record disability-related incidents. Therefore, it is difficult to get a picture of just how much disability bullying there actually is, but most of the evidence—there is not much evidence from specifically to Scotland—but most of the evidence suggests that disabled children are likely to be twice as likely to have been bullied at school as non-disabled children. That bullying can carry on into adult life. One of the concerns is that, over time, disabled people become immune—not immune to the effects of disability, but immune to it. They think that it is just part of normal life, and therefore they stop reporting incidents of bullying or harassment because they just say, well, that is just what happens. That is very worrying. It impacts longer-term on mental health of disabled people and leads to more social isolation. We would like to see more focus on getting clear data about disability bullying and greater focus on anti-bullying policies in schools on addressing the issues of disability-related harassment and the use of inappropriate language and bullying. Cara Spence from LGBT Scotland. We provide services for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people across Scotland. We also work extensively with schools to provide advice and support and training. We have an LGBT charter mark specifically for schools. I am particularly pleased to be invited here today because evidence shows that LGBT young people experience very high levels of bullying in school environments. They are not confident in reporting that to teachers and school staff. 69 per cent of LGBT young people and 77 per cent of transgender young people experience homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying in school environments. 50 per cent do not feel confident in reporting that to school staff. The impact of that can be absolutely devastating on LGBT young people, with young people reporting that they experience poor mental health, low confidence and self-esteem. Unfortunately, in many of our services across Scotland, many of them talk about feeling suicidal and having suicidal thoughts. They attribute that as a direct result of their experience of schools. We also know that bullying can affect LGBT young people's attainment, with 14 per cent leaving school as a direct result of homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying, and 10 per cent leaving as a result of a homophobic environment within a school. It is not just about bullying incidents, but about the environment and culture in which bullying incidents can take place. For us, it is also about culture change and inclusion within schools. I am Joanna Barrett. I am the policy manager at the NSPCC in Scotland, so we are the UK Child Protection Charity. On this topic, we are particularly interested in children's online safety and online dimensions to what we are talking about today. We also run the Childline Service, which is the national confidential helpline for children and young people. We also have a Speakouts day safe school service, where we aim to go into every primary school in Scotland every two years to deliver age-appropriate and fun keeping safe messages. On what we are talking about today, we put in our briefing that we had over 25,000 childline counselling contacts about bullying last year across the UK, and there is an increase, particularly in terms of counselling sessions about online bullying and harassment. We are particularly interested in the relationship of sexual health and parenthood education that children and young people get at schools, and, anecdotally, we hear that children and young people are not getting the kind of education that they want to receive. They are not having the spaces to have the conversations that they want to have in an open and non-judgmental way. Teachers are not supported to deliver that type of education or to have conversations with children and young people, so we are particularly interested in that. On online safety, a lot of the policy levers might be at a UK level, but one of the things that we can do here in a devolved setting is definitely to look at the education that we are giving to our children and young people on those subjects. I am Catherine Dawson from Rape Crisis Scotland, the National Office for the Rape Crisis Network in Scotland. My role is particularly on sexual violence prevention, so I co-ordinate our national programme. We have 13 specialist prevention workers working around Scotland going into schools and youth groups and talking to young people about consent, understanding the underpinnings of gender inequality, the cultural impact of sexualisation and pornography and how that affects the pressures and expectations that young people feel to conform to certain behaviours and norms. In relation to this, we are keen to highlight through our engagement with young people that there are very common themes and patterns emerging around the kinds of pressures and expectations that girls feel to conform to certain body images and the kind of bullying that can surround that. The kinds of pressurising and coercive behaviours that are becoming quite normal for a lot of young men in terms of asking girls to share those images of themselves, share sexual images, those images being shared off and without that girl's consent and the kinds of bullying that can emerge around those kinds of scenarios. Those are some of the common issues. Some of it, I think, there is a relationship to be established between what is bullying and what is the kinds of behaviours that are perhaps more serious forms of rape and sexual assault. Those things need to be distinguished, but the norms and behaviours that create the bullying feed into the more serious forms of rape and sexual violence. I introduce myself in an overview of what your organisation does, then we will go into questions. My name is Brian Donnelly. I am the director of Respect Me, which is Scotland's anti-bullying service. Respect Me offers support to organisations, local authorities, anyone who plays a role in children's lives to enable their, build their competence and confidence to recognise and respond to bullying more effectively. We offer policy support and guidance for organisations to cascade down locally. We offer skills development and training to support that and we offer materials, resources and campaigns to back that up all with same values and same messages. Our approach is built on working in partnership with other organisations, many of whom we see around the table today. We undertook research a couple of years ago, the largest that was done in Scotland on the prevalence of bullying, where we found that 30 per cent of children have experienced bullying. While lower than the UK average, what that told us very clearly was that face to face bullying is still considerably more prevalent than online bullying, although online bullying is very public. There are types of bullying that people have outlined, which are still the most prevalent. I could go on at length, but I will probably leave it at that and wait till questions. I want to come back with some questions anyway. Good morning, Jordan. Hi, Jordan Daly from the Time for inclusive education or TIE campaign. We have been campaigning for the last year for the Scottish Government to approach a new national approach to tackling homophobic bullying within schools. We believe that that would be best achieved by looking at the fundamental root cause of the issue. We believe that if we can begin to deliver an education that is inclusive of the issues affecting LGBT young people, then through that we can weed out the prejudice that leads to LGBT phobic bullying. Research in this area generally is consistent, which is unfortunate. Our research, which was published a couple of months ago, found that 90 per cent of LGBT people reported experiencing homophobia, biphobia or transphobia at school. In line with LGBT of Scotland's existing research in the area, we found that 64 per cent reported that they had been directly rebullied as a result of their sexual orientation or gender identity. For the sake of comparison, 92 per cent of heterosexual respondents reported that they had never been bullied because of their sexual orientation. That is consistent when we go into schools and when we speak with teachers and young people. There is quite a stark contrast between the lived experiences of LGBT young people and their heterosexual or cisgendered peers in schools. Again, we see that the impact of bullying is not only felt in the classroom environment, which I think is quite important to establish. 95 per cent of LGBT people who were bullied told us that they believed that it had had long-lasting negative effects on them. Many reported that their mental health, sense of self-consciousness and anxiety have suffered as a result of their experiences at school. In terms of what schools are doing to approach this, there is a bit of a fundamental barrier that, for the last year, we have consistently come up against. As of yet, there do not seem to have any kind of clear, concise plans or answers from the Scottish Government as to how they intend to address that barrier. That is being that if we are to approach LGBT education in schools, if we are to take steps to tackle homophobic bullying in schools, how do we ensure consistency in all schools? That is something that repeatedly comes up. We have called for teacher training, and that is one strand of what we feel would be a package of proposals that would work best. I know that the Scottish Government has committed to eventually training all teachers in its Government delivery plan, but there is no clarity as to how that is going to happen. Most obviously, to not be around the bushes, how do we approach this issue with our nominational schools? That is something that we have come up against. I will leave it at that and invite questions. Thank you very much. There are a couple of key themes that emerged in all of your descriptions and your issues that you are facing. Mental health and the impact on mental health across all the characteristics. The impact on attainment and the other thing is something that Ian spoke about very clearly is about data collection and how do we identify the problem, how do we know where it is and how that is. There have been individual pieces of research that you have all done that seem to all chime with each other. I suppose that my opening question to you all or whoever chooses to respond is some of the remedies that we need to put in place to deal with some of those key issues. The two main key issues are data collection, something that is about recording, so that is something that we probably know quite a lot about. However, how do we deal with the issues around mental health and the impact on young people, whether it is self-harm or suicide, and the impact that has on attainment and the opportunities that are then open to that young person when they start their transition from school into employment or further education? Is there any ideas, Kara? I suppose that it is about addressing the root cause of bullying and bullying behaviour. I think that that is key here rather than thinking about how we address the impact of bullying. Although, of course, resource and services would be really important within that, so a lot of our services are set up to specifically support young people who experience poor mental health. I suppose that there are two key issues moving forward. One is about how do we improve the confidence and skills of school staff to address issues. We know that many teachers still lack confidence in this area, particularly in homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying. The second challenge is consistency in Scottish schools. First of all, I would like to say that there is a lot of great work happening in Scottish schools and we really need to recognise the fantastic work of a lot of teachers and the efforts that they make to make their schools inclusive. We really need to think about consistency. There are a range of ways that we can do that. One is resource and robust training, and we need to think about how we deliver that across Scotland. There is also something about having useful resources and guidance to support practice, but we might want to look at things with a little bit more teeth, so we might want to look at regulation and inspection and how that includes all the protected characteristics and how that is reviewed with rigor within schools, because we need to look at the consistency issue. We may also want to look at legislative routes. For example, how is the Equality Act and the Specific Duties for Schools currently implemented within school environments? There are some of our ideas on how we move forward with the consistency issue. Any other comments on that point? One of the concerns that we would have is that although the aim is to get disabled children to be part of the mainstream in education, quite often being in a mainstream school does not mean that you are included in the mainstream activities of that school, and that has an impact on the mental health of disabled children because they are isolated in the schools. They are often not part of the general activities, even in the general classroom, but they are also part of the extra-calculated activities, even lunchtime in the playground. They are often excluded from those activities, and that leads to them being separated and not part of the mainstream. That impacts on their mental health, but it also leads to some of the environment that leads to bullying, because they are seen as separate. They are there for a target for bullying. One of the things that we would want to see is more effort made and partly through the school inspection process and the How Good Is Your School exercise that Education Scotland operates is to ensure that when disabled children are actually in school, they are actually part of the school as a whole and not just there in the fabric of the building. I think that that is a key aspect of it. On the other aspect, on the consistency of data, one of the important issues about recording disabled-related incidents is to see if there is a pattern. Quite often, if you do not record it as a disabled incident, it will be the same for all the other protected characteristics. You do not identify a pattern because you are not recording the specifics of the incident. You record that a child was hit, but you do not record they were hit because they were in some way vulnerable. It is important to get that recording in there so that you can then start to address some of those root causes. I suppose that we need to look at ideas where we can do that recording that is not too much work for teachers as well. You would not want it to fall foul of that. You would want it to be something that is pretty natural in the everyday working environment that allows you to collect the data, but it does not feel onerous as well. That is a bit of a magic pill that we need to find. You have just come back on that absolute point. There was a bit in the five council evidence and one of the appendices that said to me about recording the data where appropriate. I cannot understand any circumstance where it would not be appropriate. There are a number of things. Part of the challenge is what we are trying to create for schools in particular, because this issue goes beyond schools and it is bigger than schools and I think we have to be prepared to broaden that focus out in terms of the roles of communities, parents and others. Creating environments where bullying cannot thrive is a bigger issue as a bigger challenge than having recording mechanisms over here and having different approaches over here. Our research was crystal clear. Young people said in their thousands that they prefer the whole school stuff. They prefer the inclusive approach. They do not want assemblies or teachers running away worried about how much time they have to spend recording. It is about creating environments where that can happen. It goes to what Jordan said and it goes to what Kara said as well about inclusive education and talking about things other than just in a reactive sense. That is what we are trying to encourage. The biggest challenge that I would say that we have found in schools in recent years is quite a saddening one. We have found that the lack of knowledge of the equality act and protected characteristics in schools can be quite alarming. There are people who genuinely do not understand their duties and responsibilities in the context for prejudice-based bullying. We want people to treat all of these things equally. We do not want a hierarchy of issues created, but there is a hurdle to get over with colleagues in relation to understanding equality and diversity in a broader sense and understanding what a protected characteristic means and why it is a protected characteristic. That would help us to move to the next level in terms of more inclusive education and being able to challenge some elements of what has been discussed today. Where recording is useful and where recording is worthwhile that we have seen across the country is where people do record incidents and monitor it locally, where either it is a school or a collection of schools will look at the incidents that they have recorded. That will include protected characteristics and they look for trends and patterns that emerge there. The purpose of which is to tailor responses, so that if every second issue that arises in that school is in relation to gender, they need to look at target and something specifically towards that. If it is about race, they have some work to do in relation to that. That can only really be of benefit where it is happening because that lets you target resources to where the issues are. I know that others are wanting to come in. The way that we have approached this and we have spent the last year speaking to a lot of teachers and a lot of young people, because I think that it is quite important that we understand what the providers of the education are thinking and what the young people who are going to be receiving the education are thinking. When it comes to the LGBT inclusive education in particular, I am not convinced that there is one particular thing that would help. I think that there is a cluster of things that would need to be enforced together. We have already spoken about the effective recording of bullying and I think that that would help because it would give us a clearer picture. Monitoring is key. It is really important. I agree with what has already been highlighted about potentially tweaking those education Scotland structures to include a specific indicator on LGBT within the school's inspections process, as opposed to a general equality bracket. What we are generally finding in schools is that we get teachers who are telling us when we get the school's inspection that because we are really good on race or sectarianism, we are passing that. However, we are not actually looking at LGBT and that is an issue. The way that we see it is what we have coined time training inclusion monitoring. You need your teacher training and that has to be rolled out through initial teacher education. I think that the best way probably from the immediate approach to teacher training would be to target a specific quota of teachers, a specific set of teachers and what we have suggested to the Government is potentially starting on guidance, promotion posts and head teachers because I think that if the head teachers are key and that if you can manage to change the mindset of the senior management team to see that that is an issue in school, then that will trickle down throughout the school. Teacher training is a big issue but, again, that will not work on its own because you also need inclusion within guidance, within frameworks and you have to train teachers on how to use that guidance. RSHP has already been mentioned and RSHP is a problem in schools. It is very difficult to monitor how that is being provided in schools simply because there is no requirement for it to be done. I think that there actually is an argument. I know that we faced issues in the past because we often be told that we do not tell schools what to do or what to teach. That is not necessarily true. We tell schools about healthy lifestyles, healthy eating, we have obviously got the prevent agenda, we are talking about tackling radicalism in schools, so there are areas where a precedent has been set. I think that it could be argued under the Public Sector under the Equality Act that that is a human rights issue and that we should be prioritising human rights within our schools and ensuring that there is consistency there. Tim is how we would look at training, inclusion and monitoring. I think that that is the three things that we could begin with in order to ensure inclusive education in our schools. I think that that would be quite a good starting point. Again, the fundamental problem is that there is no point really embarking on a project of teacher training of updating guidance or spending a lot of money on this issue unless we are prepared to address the fundamental problem that schools are not, as it stands, required to pick up on this because there are issues in how that is delivered. I think that, as far as we are concerned, if you are an LGBT young person, it should not matter whether you go to this school or that school. You should be able to access an education that is reflective of the issues affecting you and your identity as is their right. Excellent. Thank you very much. I am going to go to some opening questions. I have got Alex first, then Jeremy. Thank you, convener. Good morning, everybody. I would like to initially look in granularity detail at the issues that Ian raised about children affected by disabilities in our schools. In 2007, the UK Government published a strategy for England and Wales called Aiming High for disabled children. That was coupled with a Barnett consequential of £35 million. However, the Scottish Government neither introduced a strategy for disabled children nor did it spend that money on children with disabilities that was known as the missing millions at the time. I began to hear from Ian and from others reflection as to whether some of the problems that you identified in your remarks about the way we consider the needs of children with disabilities in our schools would be benefited by a Scottish-specific strategy for disabled children. I think that there would be a benefit from that. I think that there have been attempts in the past to try and develop that. The Scottish Commissioner for Children and Young People produced a report in 2012 about disabled children in general, but it also had some specific references to education and building in prejudice. One of the things was about having relevant agencies establishing a high-profile education and awareness-raising campaign about disability quality in relation to disabled children and young people, but I do not think that that has ever happened. I share a lot of the points that Jordan was making and the importance of the human rights-based approach to young people with disabilities and trying to disable children and their rights to be part of the community, to be involved in the same way as everybody else. That needs to happen. There needs to be a specific look at the impact of bullying on disabled children in our schools and how that affects their inclusion in the education system. We need to ensure that mainstreaming actually means mainstreaming and not just sitting in a different corner of the same building as everybody else. Huge issues are there. There is a lack of support and resources available for disabled children. In fact, there are real concerns at the moment about the reduction in the number of teaching assistance, classroom assistance, which is impacting on the ability to give support to disabled children in our schools. There are big issues there. There is a shortage of teachers who are trained in things such as BSL and other communication support, which means that it is more difficult to include children with those particular impairments in the school system. There is a huge range of things that need to be done to properly include our disabled children in our schools. By being able to properly include them and make them part of the community, that starts to address some of the underlying issues that lead to bullying, which is quite often about people not understanding and not being aware of the particular issues that are related to the particular protected characteristic. By involving people in the education system and by having an inclusive system, that would all help. There is a need for a proper look at a strategy for disabled children in the education system in Scotland. I welcome the consensus about lifting some of that up, because mainstreaming lack of resources, a lack of inclusion and a lack of equality lead to bullying and exclusion. In some places, we are moving to that consensus that we need to address these resources and inclusion. We need to do mainstreaming properly in order to make people more confident to deal with bullying rather than this reactive thing about that if we deal with bullying. That will somehow transmit up the way that will make mainstreaming more effective. Will there be an element of that? It is sitting currently within systems that perhaps are not being properly resourced or implemented. I welcome the remarks. There was a national outcry at the time that, because of the presumption against ring-fencing, the £35 million that came north as a result of aiming high for disabled children did not touch the sides and went straight into the local authority block grant. It strikes me that there is much to be applauded about our approach to integrating disabled children in our schools, but that is slowly being eroded. I declare an interest here. I am married to the learning support teacher of primary school in the capital, but, nevertheless, there is a great distance still to travel. I am very grateful for your remarks for us to reflect on that regard. Thank you, convener, and thank you all very much for coming along and seeing what you did. My starting point is more a statement rather than a question. I think that bullying is bullying, whether it is disability or sexuality or race. I think that there is a slight danger that we go into silos here. We say that we are only going to look at this. One of the things that we, as a committee, need to look at is how we deal with bullying in schools. That is just a four-way remark. My question is probably aimed at Cowell or Ian initially. I was interested in the collection of data. Quite a lot of people have said to this that schools either do not want to collect data because they do not want to be seen as a school that has a problem or teach that they are so busy that they do not have the time. I wonder whether either of your or any of the other panel could give some suggestions of how we encourage schools to collect data and how we would go about doing that. My second question, which is probably aimed at Cowell and Ian in particular, is whether LGBT Cowell talked about the charter, which I think is really helpful. Is that something that you would look at for disability or race, having some kind of charter where we can measure these things? That has been a very helpful thing, but that has come forward. I wonder whether that is something that you look at as organisations. That would be great. In response to your first question, on how we can encourage schools to proactively monitor incidents, there are schools out there who are already doing it quite successfully. Having the chance to study their perspective would be a good way of working out how we can encourage those who are less willing. On developing a national approach, there would be some work to do to reassure education authorities in particular that having a high level of reports of racist incidents is not going to result in bad press for them, if you like, and bad press for the schools. We would see, because we know the vast amount of underreporting, we would give a round of applause to any school that records a high level of racist incidents or racist bullying. I think that there is some work to be done to reassure people that the purpose is not to point fingers or attach blame. I think that having a consistent approach with the template and a way forward and national activity to show that that information goes somewhere would be quite helpful for people in terms of convincing them that it is worth doing as well. On your second question, I certainly have had conversations with people over the years about whether a race equality charter for schools would be a beneficial thing. It would be a complex thing. I think that the issues with regard to race are quite different, partly to do with Britain's history in terms of empire and racialisation. It makes it difficult to have just a set of things that you could sign up to that will adequately address it. On the other hand, I have always felt that it would be a good thing to scope, and if there is a way to do it proactively and manage to get people on board, unfortunately the resources are distinctly lacking to carry that out. In relation to Mr Balfour's initial comments, although I agree that bullying is bullying, the fact that, if you are a disabled child, you are twice as likely to be bullied as a child without disabilities. If you are an LGBT child, you are more likely to be bullied, and if you have an ethnic minority, you are more likely to be bullied. I think anti-bullying strategies need to address those specific issues, because just treating each individual bullying incident on its own is not going to address the underlying causes of that bullying, so the focus has to be on those points. I was struck by a point in the Quality and Human Rights Commission's evidence about the fact that it is concerned that, until recording and publication of data on bullying and identity-based harassment is placed in a statutory footing, practice is likely to remain uneven across Scotland, both within and between education authorities. I am not necessarily advocating a statutory basis for the recording, but I think that there is a need for national consistency. Education Scotland probably has the lead role in trying to ensure that there is a consistent practice across Scotland in how incidents are recorded. Any incident of bullying and harassment should be recorded in schools, indicating that, if there is an underlying cause related to prejudice-based disability and bullying, it should not create any huge additional workload if you are recording an incident in the first place. The final point is just on relation to national codes of contact or whatever. There are ways, through the curriculum for excellence and using things like the right respecting schools agenda, to ensure that if we have a human rights-based approach to tackling prejudice and bullying and harassment in our schools, the issues in relation to whether it is racist, LGBT, gender or disability-related incidents can be incorporated into that rights-respecting school, part of the curriculum for excellence, and it should be done so. There are some excellent materials available from south of the border from the anti-bullying alliance on, for example, dealing with things like disability-related and inappropriate language. Those things could be incorporated quite easily into the curriculum for excellence. I thank both the comments by Carol and by Ian. I accept Ian's first comment. It was interesting that I had a constituent who came to me last week, whose daughter has a fairly big issue with hearing, and she has been mainstreamed. She gets on okay in class, but is completely excluded at lunchtime and break time, as you say. Is that bullying not direct bullying? I do not know how you record that, but I think that those types of incidents as well. I am sure that that may happen in other areas where someone is doing fairly well academically or doing okay academically, but the other benefits of school are simply passing them on by. How do we record that, and how do we deal with that? I think that that is a big issue. I am not necessarily asking for a response, but I accept your comment. Willie Coffey Ian, you mentioned how good is our school, Higgy, of course, for. Is it too early? I know that it has been in place since August this year. Is it too early to tell how successful or otherwise that will be in asking schools to evaluate where they are in relation to all those matters and what additional might need to be done to help us to gather the kind of data that some of you have been asking us to collect? I have firstly said that I am not a world expert on the education system, but a number of us are members of the Equalities Advisory Group for Education Scotland, and we are aware of Higgy S4. I do not think that Higgy S4 has sufficient in it to address some of the issues that we are talking about today to make that major difference. Obviously, it is too early to say how effective it is going to be in some of the areas that has made improvements, as most schools will still be going through the initial phases of that. However, I do think that it probably needs to be reviewed again to deal a bit more specifically with some of the protected characteristics issues that I do not think it does fully address. The key point is that we need to include all protected characteristics within the framework, because at the moment it does not, and I think that it is really important to be specific. It is important for inspectors to review that with rigor with schools. From what we know in terms of current practice, what they can do is see that they have done something at some point on equalities and it is ticked. I would like to see equalities to be thought of in the round and to be looked at with rigor within a school environment, to see that that culture and environment within the school is inclusive for all its pupils. Yes, thanks. I just wanted to pick up on the point that Cara was making. I am definitely sympathised with the fact that schools seem to be able to say that they have done a thing, and that means that you are complying or you seem to be good at equality work. I think that the perspective from the race equality side of things is slightly different to some of the other protected characteristics. I think that there has been an emphasis for longer in schools on building in race equality-based stuff, whether it is in the curriculum or within specific projects that aim to look at. Most commonly, they will call it diversity, which, to us in the equality arena, means quite a different thing. Diversity work is a big business in schools. The problem that we have come across is that an awful lot of the diversity work that is done in Scottish schools is entrenching racial stereotypes, which creates more problems for pupils. There is a big focus on looking at the different things that people do around the world, which then leads assumptions to be made that kids in class who are from that background also do that stuff and are interested in that stuff. It is very patronising for a child whose great grandparents were born here of Pakistani origin, perhaps, to have to sit through a lesson that is talking about what Pakistani people do in a quite a patronising way. There is certainly room for learning about world cultures and things like that. It is a good thing for children's learning and development, but I think that the way in which it is nuanced is really important. The context has to be that minority ethnic communities are a central part of Scottish society and not some sort of additional group of people to be welcomed, which I think is the slant that a lot of schools are putting on it. We would like to see from an anti-bullying point of view significantly better practice in how those issues are dealt with in curriculum. From a lot of people's comments, the lack of specificity is really important, because if you have a generic statement that says to make sure that all students are treated the same and to perhaps give markers to what kinds of issues you might want to be aware of at school, that is a start, but if the school does not have that understanding about how to recognise the things that are playing out, everything from the very everyday things, from our perspective, things like sexist comments, sexist insults, unwanted sexual comments, those kinds of things. If they do not recognise them not just as bad behaviour, but as being motivated by something in particular, if they are not able to spot that and address that in an educational way, so being able to tackle those attitudes, then they are not able to report back on that in their inspection framework in any meaningful way. One thing that we are working alongside with Zero Tolerance and the University of Glasgow Social and Public Health Sciences Unit is a whole schools approach to gender equality, which would look at gender intersected with other kinds of protected characteristics as well, but to help schools to fully embed that understanding across all aspects of their institution, their ethos, their practice and for young people to be involved in shaping what that looks like in their school as well. That is our answer to something that has come back, you know, loud and clear to us from our engagement with schools, that they really need support to fully understand the issues before they can effectively tackle them. Willie, do you want to come back? Please, convener, just briefly, thank you very much for those comments. I have spoken about the impact of bullying on youngsters who experience those situations and training in support for teachers, but what about the bullies themselves? What kind of interventions do you feel we have or have had or should have with people who carry out that kind of practice to see if we can change their minds? What is your own experience with that? We have talked about tackling root causes. I think that it is important to recognise that the attitudes that are used, the attitudes that motivate bullying are where we need to focus our initial energy in terms of taking a primary prevention approach. We need to first of all be proactively, preemptively addressing the kinds of attitudes that underpin any kinds of prejudice-based bullying. We also then need for a school to have a clear understanding and a clear behavioural code about what kinds of behaviours are not acceptable and why. I think that it is really important as well. Then, yes, to be having a consistent response, I think that too often young people are told to sort of just get over it and ignore it. I think that it has got to be proportionate. I think that it has probably got to be educational and not just punitive. I think that that is really important. Obviously, when we are getting to the forms of bullying and violence and abuse that are maybe criminal offences, there needs to be effective links with social work and police on those as well. It is a big question that I will try and boil down an answer to based on what we have learned and the approach that we have in Scotland. I probably should kick off. We need to recognise that bullying is behaviour. It is challenging behaviour and all behaviour communicates needs. That echoes why people behave in a certain way and the root causes of that can be ignorance, prejudice, a feeling of superiority or whatever. What we have found is that labelling and talking about bullies is unhelpful. Children can bully other children. Children can be bullied and bullied. There is no one typical. Part of the problem that we have had is trying to challenge the notion of that this is what a school bully looks like and this is how a bully thinks. It does not reflect reality. Bullying is something that people do to something else that makes them feel a certain way and makes them feel a loss of control and an ability to take action. That is not about softening in the language, but you do not help people to change their behaviour by labelling them. You help people to change their behaviour by saying that when you said that and when you did that, that is unacceptable. Here is what we expect instead. Whereas if you say that you are a bully, you are going to get a defensive reaction from them, a defensive reaction from parents. That is not helpful to improving the impact on someone who has been bullied. It is one of the reasons that people do not want to report it. It is one of the reasons that certain types of bullying are under-reported is that they are rushed to label and blame. I am not suggesting that there are not consequences for bullying. There have to be children who bully others who need help to repair relationships. They need to have prejudice addressed. They need to have levels of ignorance or assumptions that they have addressed that may be reinforced at home by generations of prejudice or generations of attitudes towards people that are different. A lesson in school on diversity is that carol so eloquent would not change that in the slightest. They need help. They need to see alternative ways of behaving. That behaviour needs to be rewarded. When that behaviour does, if it is not unsuccessful, it escalates and it becomes violence, abusive or sexually aggressive, we need to stop conflating that with bullying and treat that for what it is, which is a far more serious type of behaviour. It is a big question, but it is a fundamental approach that we have in Scotland. We do not label people. We talk about behaviour and impact. We feel that that has been successful and it is not something that anyone would necessarily feel is a negative or a difficult part of our approach in Scotland. I hope that answers your question. I think that, on this question in particular, it is something that has come up when we piloted to teacher training courses a couple of months ago. It is something that the teachers who constructed our training programme specifically looked at. When the secondary education in particular was being delivered, we found that what was quite helpful was that it was about making teachers aware that, rather than immediately castigating the person who is carrying out the bullying or the prejudice behaviour, it is about using probing techniques that allow you to understand what it is that is causing them to have these attitudes. I think that, when it comes to atitudes in homophobic building in particular, something that we generally find when we go into schools is when you ask the kids themselves, do you have a problem with LGBT people? The responses generally no, which then makes you wonder why they are using LGBT phobic language or behaviour. It is about weeding out that attitudinal environment that, to be blunt, has allowed us to create generational failure within schools. When it comes to how do we change the attitudes, not only of the young person that is being bullied, how do we change their experiences, but how do we change the experiences of the young people who are bullying? I think that it is going to sound cliche because we keep going over it. I think that it again comes back to that inclusive education. On race, I can remember my experience in school. I remember learning about the Ku Klux Klan, Martin Luther King, Lynchons and Southern America. I remember being appalled, and I know that Liam, who is here and a little bit older than me, talks about when he was at school, he learned about apartheid South Africa and how, if you ran over a black man, you did not have to report it, but if you ran over a dog, you did. He can specifically remember the impact that that had on his peers. I do not remember any racism in my school, I am aware that it does go on in schools, but there was a whole school approach in my school about zero tolerance to racism. People knew that there were certain things that you did not and would not say, and it was also prejudiced to engage in racist behaviour among peers. That is the level that we need to get with LGBT. I think that that inclusive educational approach will take us there. Llywydd, do you want to come back? No, that is fine. I will just like call it. I have walked Mary next. Thank you convener and good morning everyone. Brian, you used a word that struck a chord with me, and Cara, you have kind of followed up on it because Brian, you used the word reactionary, and Cara, you said tick a box. I always have a concern with strategies. It is another tool that is put into a school or whatever institution it is being used in, and it is a way of monitoring and checking, but it is a tick box. I wonder if you can expand a bit more on how much you think the strategies to tackle discrimination and bullying underpin what goes on in schools. Is it part of the ethos of the school, or is it done in a way where there is an incident, so there is a bit more investment put in and the box is ticked and we move on, or is it something that forms part of the day-in, day-out life of a school where it is just part of what they teach, that is the understanding, the acceptance, forms part of the culture of the school? I would be interested on the thoughts, particularly of Brian Carab and the rest of the panel, and the other question that I wanted to ask was to Jordan, because the figures that are presented on LGBT bullying are quite, honestly, horrific. It is horrific that the percentage of young LGBT people that report bullying and offensive behaviour is simply not acceptable. Is it simply a case of teachers don't feel confident in dealing with LGBT discrimination? Is the policy not updated enough? Is there not enough refresh put into the policies that would help schools to tackle LGBT? How much benefit do you think mentoring in schools actually has? I'm sorry that I've thrown all of that out there, but I'd get it all out. Okay, sorry. I'll try and be brief. People that know me know that that is a struggle to answer that. I think what you describe as essentially what we would probably collectively think of as best practice in terms of that being part of the school ethos, that being part of the everyday activity of the school, that when you go into that school you get a sense that it's inclusive, you get a sense that it's a safe place to be, you get a sense that teachers listen to what people are saying, you get a sense that the community is reflected in that school. That's why I talked about earlier creating environments where bullying can't thrive. A policy won't do that, but the journey that we ask people to go on to develop policy can be a catalyst for that happening. What we ask in the guidance that we give that does mention all of the protected characteristics and prejudice-based bullying up front, if you engage with pupils about what you think that policy should look like in our school, what should we say in this organisation and you ask parents and you ask carers what they think and ask teachers what they think and the people that work there what they think and construct that within the context of what everyone is talking about today around inclusion and fairness. You can then construct something meaningful so that when you say bullying to one parent they don't think that that means something that nine other parents think it means something else. I only want to hear about that if it happens to my children, not if it's done by my children. It requires ownership at a senior level where the practice is good. You've got senior teachers in schools that say that we're not in this school, we're going to make sure this school does it a certain way, we're going to do it through drama, we're going to do it through music, we're going to do it through English, we're going to do it that way. Where there's a commitment to doing that, it becomes less reactionary. Where there's a commitment to doing that, they will have high levels of bullying recorded and we would applaud them for that. But the reality is that their peers don't want that level of recording because people do make judgments, which is absurd. We've got to reframe how we see that at a strategic level that one school with 50 incidents isn't better than a school with 10 incidents. It might be, but the simple recording doesn't tell you that. Crucially, what we found is that where people have a focus on recording, probably too much of a focus on recording, practice isn't always good just because they record stuff. Recording is only going to be effective and this is what we support is only going to be effective if it's part of your whole approach. You record prejudice-based bullying because you do not accept homophobia, race, disability prejudice, gender-based stuff in your school and that's what you're doing so that recording is a logical part of creating an environment where bullying can't thrive. Creating an environment where bullying happens, people are confident enough to recognise it and respond to it and to deal with it. We do get rather fixated on policy and recording and I know they're important. They are very, very important because that's the framework that we hold people accountable to. We've got a chance collectively to make sure that what we do is about that whole journey that people go on to say that if we run a school, we run an after school club, we run a basketball team, what do we want it to feel like? Other people can come in on that in terms of the areas that might need to be addressed. I can tell you whether our national policies are working. I don't know that for sure. I am hopeful that the national approach will trickle down in some way because it sets a template for what we expect in schools across Scotland. I can tell you what I believe works. Our charter mark model set out a way in which we're working with schools that is about changing school culture. It's quite resource intensive but what that looks at is school policies, staff training, their practice, monitoring and recording and they also have to provide evidence of us that there has been a change within that school environment and get feedback directly from young people. The other thing that's really important is leadership and the charter mark only works where there's meaningful leadership within a school environment. There is something for us about how to be built on leadership models within Scotland because senior managers and individual teachers and young people can all be leaders in their schools but they should be setting the climate of what is expected or not expected within a school environment and I think that's what I'd like to see moving forward. I'll try and answer it briefly but what I am going to do is kind of look beyond the statistics and speak a little bit more anecdotally about what we've heard and the research that we've put out includes a lot of comments from teachers who have themselves kind of highlighted where they see things going. To answer the question, yes, what we get consistently is that teachers don't have the confidence to address these issues but I think that that's something that we obviously hear quite a lot and we sometimes hear it in the media. We've heard it in this committee before and I think that there's a risk that teachers don't have the confidence to do this can just come across as a bit of kind of empty rhetoric and I think that once you actually look past that it's well what do you not have the confidence to do and what we are seeing is that in some schools it's some schools just are not addressing this full stop they're hearing this language and teachers are shying away from addressing it and other schools though what we are seeing is that teachers are telling us that yes they can address the language they'll say don't say that that's not acceptable but then it's a full stop and there's no progress after that and something which is highlighted which consistently came up when we were conducting research was teachers saying I feel confident enough to address this to challenge the language when I hear it I'll say that's not acceptable but then I don't understand I don't kind of feel confident enough to go into why is that not acceptable can I have the conversations with the pupil can I tell them that being gay is okay is that all right to say is that going to get me in trouble there is an issue consistently within Catholic schools as well whereby because there's been very little guidance or national leadership from SCES and also from the Scottish Government in terms of specifically LGBT within Catholic schools we worryingly have spoken with teachers at union conferences, at child's conferences, teachers' conferences and what we've met Catholic school teachers who's still some still think that section 28 is in place and others think that they'll lose their job if they discuss this within schools and I think addressing that in itself we have met with the Catholic education service we asked if they'd be prepared to engage with us and work with us on getting Catholic specific materials on teachers rights on why teachers are protected and on why actually under the equality act it is okay to introduce this and discuss this in faith schools the answer was no but I'm sure that the the Scottish Government of Education Scotland might have better luck than we did and I think that yes teachers don't have confidence but it's understanding what it is that they've not got the confidence to teach and I think that the best way to approach that is obviously teacher training and teachers are agreeing. The other question on mentoring within schools this is something again which has come up but there's also kind of two strands I'm so sorry because I feel like everything that's coming up I'm saying this is complex and having to dig into it but on mentoring in schools in a nutshell yes it works in terms of the value leaving academy for example is a very very good school and they are a good example of best practice and I know that they would be prepared to come in and speak to you guys about what they're doing. What the value leaving academy do is they have an LGBT committee which is a model which we've been investigating for the last year and seen how we could get that in schools they have young people and teachers involved in that committee but they also have teachers generally across board some who are not involved in the committee also trained on the issues because on mentoring young people identify with the teachers that they feel have an interest in the topic but they're then at the risk that if schools say well this is great Jordan English is really interested in LGBT let's just get him trained then that teacher then becomes the gay teacher and the teacher that the only one in the school which is equipped to address this and that's not necessarily what we need which is why we're saying that we need to target a specific quota of teachers to begin with and then roll it out from from there. Thank you. I wanted to ask just a very brief follow-up question and it's in relation to the policy that exists in the strategy that's being used because where you have a situation Brian you describe best practice where this is part of ethos and underpins the regime in the school when there is a strategy how often would you like to see that strategy refreshed and seriously looked at because it seems that bullying is not a thing that you can write a document and say this is what you need to do to eradicate it because it almost seems as if it's constantly changing and moving so the policy I think would need to be up to date and would need to be refreshed so how often would you like to see something like this refreshed throughout to everybody? Yeah I would like to think that at a local level people should be looking at it you know when you review what's happened on an annual basis that should really tell you do we need to change this what are we we've created something and actually we got this whole range of incidents that related to nothing that we had planned for we need to change that I think from an organisational perspective they should be looking every cut two to three years at it and but also then designing something that is not going to you've not given concrete shoes to like as possible for a policy to be dynamic enough you know that it's inclusive enough and that it does recognise you know it's not overly if you make it overly prescriptive people will have a very literal take on it and that will limit their practice we need to design in that you're reviewing it every year in terms of what impact it's had we've designed new tools for individual schools to do that with we've tried to mirror some of what is in Highears 4 to give them a framework in examples that they may be familiar with but also that then you then score yourself on that and you know it's not as simple as if you get less than that then you need to do something about it but the policy yeah you should every year you should be looking at its effectiveness at a local level local authorities can have a larger time space in between then as well okay Ian you want to do come on I was just in the issue about language and importance of that I think it's I think there is a need for teachers to have a clear understanding of the importance of language for example in the disability movement we refer to disabled people because they are disabled by the factors in society such as access or attitudes or economic issues or inability communication things like that they're not disabled by their condition they're disabled by environmental factors in society and it's important that teachers understand that and don't allow people to people's to use languages inappropriate but we're able to actually challenge that to say why are you why are you saying that don't you understand this and I think that applies to across the protected characteristics that people need to the teachers need to have that confidence that they understand the language and the damage that inappropriate language can cause to to young people. Good point, Ani. My question is probably for everyone here the curriculum for excellence says we want all our children to get the support they need to benefit fully from their education, all adults who work in schools have a responsibility to support and develop mental, emotional, social and physical well-being why isn't that being done then if we're saying that there's so many issues with disability, gender, LGBTI surely under the curriculum for excellence it's saying that that's what should happen in schools so I'm going to ask the question why do we think it isn't happening in schools? Yeah the curriculum for excellence frustrates me because one of its biggest benefits is that it's quite vague but then it's also its massive weakness and what I think with the curriculum for excellence you've got your expectations and outcomes but they are extremely vague and on the one hand that does allow schools to be creative with how they approach it but on the other hand I don't think that just putting out really vague guidelines for example one of them talks about children should know about different and diverse family types now if I'm a teacher I can discuss single parents I can discuss same-sex parents or I can't but if I don't discuss same-sex parents I'm still covering the diverse family type so it's complex but I think that what needs to happen with the curriculum for excellence is there probably does need to be a little bit of further guidance which kind of emphasis it a wee bit and points teachers in the right direction and I know that there's been progression frameworks just put out and I think that that has potentially been a bit of a missed opportunity not to maybe look at LGBT or even disability and some of the other protected characteristic areas there so in a nutshell curriculum for excellence too vague does need to have some other stuff there which points teachers in the right direction but then again this does need to be bodied up with training it's not enough to just give teachers loads of materials and expect them to go ahead on it you need to train them and then on training one thing very briefly that I've not mentioned is that cost is always brought up as a big big barrier so the charter work has been brought up and some of the other training has been brought up but that cost and that's not the fault of the people who are providing that service they provide vital services for young people and they need an income to sustain so what we've argued is that what should be looked at is how can we get this training into schools free of charge can it be covered nationally and I think that that's something that is going to have to be addressed we can't continue charging local authorities hundreds of pounds to go on lgbt training because they're not going to prioritise it if they have to spend money on it and the other thing as well is that when it comes to training I do kind of want to urge that the way the Scottish government seem to be going is that they are deflecting it a bit on to the organisations and making it their responsibility that's the way we've always operated and I think that now is the time to be quite clear that no we do need a national approach and it's not 100% the responsibility of ourselves lgbt youth and stonewall to go on to schools and tackle this because we are having problems and that we can't get into every school and we do need the government to step in and sort that for us carol I think from our point of view if you look at racist bullying I think Jordan is definitely right in saying that there are ways that they can meet all the criteria within curriculum for excellence and still manage to not tackle it properly and for us the key thing is the discomfort within the education sector more broadly with the whole concept of racism and the term racism and I think that's partly because there's a misunderstanding which I think is made worse by the way that public discourse around racism works the word racism is now seen as an insult or will racist is seen as an insult if you've been accused of racism that's a personal insult against you you're accused of it you know it's there's the focus is shifted away from reminding people that certain types of behaviour or certain ways of doing things are actually quite racist to it being if you've said that you've called someone a racist and you can't do that we can't label schools as racist and I think about as being racist and I think that goes back to what Brian was saying about not labeling people as bullies as well and that doesn't mean you don't talk about bullying and say that what you did there was bullying behaviour and I think we need teachers to have the confidence to be able to do that around race as well at the moment in the policy arena the fear of being accused of racism actually seems to be a greater concern to people than tackling racism they would rather just pretend it doesn't exist if we don't say the word it's not real but I'm afraid the real world doesn't work like that I've got Joanna and Catherine I think what we've heard over Elmanly today is that there's a complete lack of clarity about what's actually happening in Scottish schools and I think anecdotally we'd say the same I mean some schools have an hour of you know RSHP or whatever it is others it's embedded in the curriculum and I think it would be we would like the committee to look more at that and actually find out what is happening and what's the reality in schools in terms of kind of sexual health and relationships education it's certainly a priority for us and we've concentrated in schools because obviously that's what we're talking about today but Brian did mention what's the role of communities here and whenever we speak to teachers they're saying you know hold on because we are becoming the bastion of every social issue under the sun and we're not able to address these things in the depth that that maybe others would like and attitudes are reinforced out with schools and children spend the majority of the time out with schools so how are schools engaged with parents and communities to reinforce the kind of values that we want to have collectively and I think we need to make sure that this is not seen as a peripheral issue because at a policy level we're very focused on educational attainment and we're very focused on child and adolescent mental health this strikes both issues because it's affecting both issues and in terms of the kind of RSHP guidance I think that's a classic just like Jordan said it's really vague it should do this it should do that it should do that it's you know what and if it happened it's magic it doesn't happen is ultimately the problem you look at England and a lot of their guidance and education this is far more prescriptive and I'm not saying that that's necessarily a good thing but they have looked at these things in far more infinite detail at a national level than we have you look at Wales they've got a duty to provide counselling in a school setting for secondaries we need to open this up as a national conversation because we haven't discussed healthy relationships at a national level despite a myriad of Scottish government policies point at this being dead important like violence games women like teenage pregnancy like child sexual exploitation everything says and education is key prevention but we don't actually know what's happening Catherine I think I've heard I think this is correct that there's very little in terms of the health and wellbeing component of curriculum effects there's very little sort of content in this initial teacher training on those issues I think the teachers that I meet or that my colleagues are working with are really really concerned about a lot of the issues that we've talked about but that isn't always matched with their understanding of the best way to go about tackling those things and so you know we've talked today about taking reactive responses and reaction is you know it's it's it's not desirable in many ways a lot of harm has already taken place by the time people are reacting and it's more resource intensive as well to react so I think if we can bear in mind the initial and ongoing teacher training to be better equipping teachers to proactively tackle a lot of these issues rather than use a lot of their resources and a lot of the sort of I suppose emotional panic that goes into tackling really sort of worrying problems that are happening for young people then that would be a better yes I think to emphasise the preparedness of teachers to fully understand the issues and understand how to tackle them proactively Brian, very quickly because we've exhausted our time obviously not our questions I think that the points being made in relation to NHSP relationships, health and wellbeing, school ethos, violence against women these are all bigger issues than anti-bullying these all cause and contribute to anti-bullying and you won't resolve these by starting with your anti-bullying working working up the way it has to complement what's coming for teachers literacy, new and insane health and wellbeing are three core components of the curriculum and you can qualify as a teacher without spending any time on health and wellbeing you get a week where I'll come along, Kara comes along and others come along and talk to him about health and wellbeing within a context we have to take that back a stage and say that if if it's responsibility for all why am I not learning about it but I'm at university why do I not have to sit exams why do I not have to create coursework that shows I understand equalities the impact of all the things that people have been talking about and one last caveat as well in relation to just something earlier in relation to the role of senior pupils they can play a really big role in that but we need to be very mindful senior pupils are busier probably than they've ever been and exams future planning positive destinations takes many fifth and sixth year pupils out of the equation for almost the entire school year so we just need to be mindful of that as well sorry I will okay we've got a second panel to hear from this morning and hopefully we'll we'll be able to explore some of the other you know issues that you've raised this morning and we have completely exhausted our time this morning I'm so sorry for others I couldn't call back in but this is an initial scoping exercise I think you know you've given us four five or maybe six key strands where we could go and do for some further work on which we would discuss as a committee how we take that forward but we do have a second panel coming in this morning so we want to hear from them first before we make any conclusive decisions yet can I thank you all so much for a very very interesting evidence session this morning I'm sure it won't be the last that we will speak to you but we're very grateful for your participation this morning and hopefully we can move some of this forward and we'll see you again so thank you I want to briefly suspend for about five minutes for a quick comfort break and to allow our witness panels to change over good morning and welcome back to the equality and human rights committee we've heard from our first panel this morning we're now about to hear from a second panel on the same topic which is our scoping session on bullying in schools I'm delighted to have a panel of four with us this morning and I'm going to do the same and allow each panel member to introduce themselves tell me a wee bit about their research of their organisation so Dr Kate it's over can start with you sure thank you and it was an interesting morning so I appreciate being able to hear from that I'm co-director at the center for research on families and relationships and my own collaborative work is firmly within children's human rights so as you know from my evidence I think it's wonderful that the committee is taking that kind of approach and I suppose just fundamentally we have heard over and over again from children and young people that bullying harassment and hate crime as we know is is a big issue and we still haven't solved that over years so I think it is very timely that the committee is taking a look and I think a fresh look at it so for example we don't need more surveys from children knowing it's a problem what we arguably need more evidence about is what kind of problem and what is the solution so I think fundamentally it is the work and the approach that I would tend to take but starting from the children and the young people is a critical issue Bill? Bill Ramsey, convener of the quality committee of the educational institute of Scotland an important point the institute is not just a trade union we are as the label says the educational institute of scotland the quality committee of the institute produces advice for our members on a whole range of human rights and equality issues and as I was preparing my notes for the introduction which I will actually edit down we have in my last count eight discrete documents that address and give advice to our members in relation to bullying and harassment of pupils and of teachers indeed the last document we produced they get in the right for girls Christina you came along along with a number of your colleagues and we welcome your contribution to that one of the key issues I think that we need to look at is the and it came up in the discussion so I'm going to cut away from a lot of all those additional notes that I've got there is the resources and the time that teachers have to take forward this agenda and I'm going to deal with some practicalities and I'll come to them and we're actually discussions but I'll highlight two or three things in the first instance it's important to realise that teachers only have a certain amount of time out with the classroom to address to train to train up on various issues to actually develop a further develop that their professionalism because after all unlike other jobs they spend the vast majority of their time interacting with young people so therefore there's some additional time for training and for reflection about seven and a half hours a week they have to prepare for their lessons that they're actually on going and there is roughly about five hours a week that they have to refresh now it's teachers do much more than that but I'm just giving that as a ballpark figure so therefore there's an issue of priorities and that comes to some extent from the Government and from local authorities and from a further education they call these management so it's not just set by the teacher themselves and one other point before I hand over to Rhywunia is there is at the moment within all schools in Scotland in all parts of Scotland a bit of a cover crisis and I'll give you one example practical example of where some of the issues that were addressed by the previous panellists a practical difficulty in that take your typical primary school head teacher because of the cover crisis under normal circumstances depending on the size of the school they may if it's in a small school spend some time teaching and a proportion of their time managing the school because of the cover crisis they have less time to reflect because they're teaching because there are not enough teachers at certain times of the year the choke point gets into winter and into January February but that is a crucial point so in terms of developing strategies and this is a particular plea for primary head teachers if they have to provide leadership they need the time to lead to lead and if they're having to provide cover to teach because there is a shortage then they don't have the time to do that leadership reflection exercise there are many other issues time is limited and I'll pass on to Rhywunia. Rhywunia Arshad I'm based at the Murray House School of Education I'm the head of school there but for today's purposes I'm here as the co-director of the Centre for Education for Racial Quality in Scotland which is a research centre so what are some of the things that struck me I thought was a brilliant panel this morning already covered a lot of points the first thing is across decades of research is this inconsistency between what the adults feel they're able to talk about and what young people want to talk about and we need to actually break that and consistently we find that young people do want to talk about social issues they do want to engage with difficult topics like racism or homophobia or islamophobia but as adults regardless of the time factor and things we seem to have much more anxiety about that and the concern from our research is are we therefore short changing our future people from being able to shape policy and actually reinventing the wheel therefore of shawning them back into the structures that we're comfortable with so I think that's the first thing is that fracture between what teachers, educators and I include university lecturers in that is wanting to talk about and what young people are wanting to talk about so actually young people need to be part of whatever next scooping there has to be in terms of leading I think some of that development the second is that I have to say a lot of our research shows that young people feel that schools are safe spaces they provide consistency they provide and my teachers do try to deal with these issues even if they make a bit of a mess of it young people really appreciate that and I think we've got to put that again that you know they understand that and I think in Scotland because we have actually taken a very strong rhetoric about inclusion and challenging discrimination we don't have as permissive an environment as perhaps elsewhere but the flip side of that is that we need to put our foot on the pedal and keep it there because I think that could send us into a complacent mode as well and that was a bit was in my submission in working with teachers at the moment I was a little bit taken aback in hearing recently that actually on the ground head teachers and teaching colleagues talking about a culture at the moment in the world in the UK which is beginning to legitimise the freedom of speech oh I can make these sorts of comments and so in my submission this thing about the parent who was robbed and the parents child was doing the bullying and the parents said well my my kid got caught that was a bit unfortunate but it happens in the school it's just that my children got caught and that head teacher said she didn't think six months ago and I have to say she used the term pre-Brexit that this would have been a kind of response that she would have had so that shocked her and I'll conclude with two very quick points one was already panel one said it wasn't just about teacher confidence it's about the understanding of perhaps how the nature of bullying so the absence of overt bullying racism homophobia whatever doesn't mean there's harmony I think we're going underground we're a lot more sophisticated now even young people a lot more sophisticated it's the body swerve it's there not recognising you it's those daily aggressions and invalidations that's harder to record and nail down because it's generally done out with the presence of the people who can do that recording and also if you're not on the receiving end you don't know it so I think that's more subtle so maybe actually we are better at tackling the overt stuff but not the other I think that was oh yeah and it was simply to say that I do training in in terms of in the school of education in fact tomorrow I'm doing a session with into headship which is of course the programme of people wanting to become heads in the future and at the last session that I did with into headship one of the participants there said to me well Rowena it's great what you're talking about race issues and things but actually these are not issues that affect my school so if you'd been talking about social class now I would have been interested in that but because you're talking about minority ethnic I really only have one or two in my school I think I was quite shocked I didn't respond and actually I thought but in fact reflecting and see if somebody says that to me tomorrow I will be pushing back on it but I think I was so shocked I thought oh okay because in a learning environment you don't want to actually make people their backs into a corner and I didn't have enough thinking time at that point to think how do I convert this into a quick learning educational response okay Dr McCluskey. Good morning. Yes, Gillian McCluskey and I'm today I might I should say my own research is around issues of exclusion from school in many different forms but today I'm representing the deans of the education and the HEIs across Scotland. You got the written submission but there's just a couple of things I may be pointing to and then I know perhaps you'll come back to and preface that by saying I thought the discussion earlier was incredibly helpful and opened out a lot of issues that I know the four of us would also want to support and to just give an illumination to those things. Clearly one of the things that came up quite a lot was teacher education in its different forms. One of the things we are quite aware of and that people said already this morning is that there is a lack of teacher confidence and there is also a lack of teacher skills and that is throughout beginning teachers right through to more experienced teachers but what there also is I think is quite clearly a commitment to do things better so people want to do it but they're not sure how to and maybe I can say a little bit later on about how we already do a lot of work within both initial teacher education and CPD to try and support that but I do think there's much more to be done. I think also as well as what we can do in schools and I think this was a point that was made earlier in your early panel. Schools are only one site where this is happening and we want to do everything that we can to ensure that we do everything that is possible but we also have to recognise the relationship between the school and the community, the school and parents and I think there is an enormous amount of work still to be done on schools relationships with parents and schools relationships with community and if I can just make one point about bullying in terms of online bullying I wholly support the views that have been said already about there isn't actually a fundamental substantive difference between online cyber bullying and face-to-face bullying if we like but what online bullying has done is shown up it's highlighted the fact that we don't know quite where the boundaries are between school and what else happens in children's lives and I think now that we know that I mean there's been a lot of very good recent research that's been talked about but we know things now that we perhaps didn't have access to in the past or they're clarified for us and we really do have a duty now to do something about those things and that would just be one example so I think this is really really a timely scoping session. Okay thank you I'm going to go to questions Delwix. Thank you convener and good morning everybody thank you for coming to see us. I think both panels have impressed me this morning. Jordan daily did a fantastic job of transporting me back to S2 modern studies and our race relations discussions about apartheid and racism and I really do think it had a measurable impact on people's attitudes. Obviously when I was in S2 that was still very much at the time when Clause 2A or section 28 was very much in sway and we learned nothing about homosexuality at school and and did so on pain of prosecution. We've heard several panels now in the course of this committee's business that have referenced the fact that there is still hangover from Clause 2A and that a teacher reluctance to engage discussion in homosexuality or anything connected with sexual and sexuality particularly in Catholic schools. I'd be keen to hear the reflections of the panel and I think it's a really useful opportunity to hear from people like the EIS and other educationalists and people who are conducting research. How do we break that down? Does it require further public policy development? Does it require reexamining things like the curriculum for excellence so that people in S2 modern studies in the future will be learning about Harvey Milk and Stonewall and the journey that the gay community have been on to get parity and equality? I commend that. The institute's position in relation to denominational schools is that we don't have a view of abolishing denominational schools, in that sense. It's for the community to decide whether or not the Catholic community decides whether or not denominational schools should continue. That's the position of the institute and that's been arrived at in over a series of years and various discussions at annual general meetings. We believe that it's for the Scottish Government to set the standards and also the general teaching council of Scotland. If you look, for instance, at the GTCS standards, which I have of a paper copy here but I've pulled it up, it flags up social justice and and trust and respect. It's clear that all teachers, irrespective of establishments, have a duty—and it's actually a duty—to overtake and abide by those standards. In that sense, there is a rubric there that can be taken forward and should be taken forward everywhere. There is also an HMIE, someone referenced Higgs four earlier on, problematic in some areas, maybe not. It's only in relatively recent years that I've been a member of the Equality Committee for 15 years anyway of the institute and I remember moving a motion at our AGM for the institute to go to the then Scottish Administration to say that equality reporting should be an embedded part of the inspection process and that isn't out there, but it's still being developed. In that area, it is for Governments to take forward that particular agenda and ensure that all of the standards are abided by it. One detail is that our members want to take forward an equality agenda through all of the strands that we, within the institute, in the past five years, have developed discrete equality representatives. One of the issues that we face is that we have members who want to go on this training, but because of the situation over cover, they are not able to do so. In a sense, that is about the priorities that are set by our employers and by the Government about resources, because if teachers are to develop and become confident—and I think that this is an important point—the confidence issue is crucial, they need the training. If they are going to get the training, that will only be provided if the resources are there. If they are going to remove teachers from school and that happens from time to time for additional training, sometimes training can be provided to some extent outwith the pupil day, but that is a matter of priorities for local authorities and for the Government. That is an expensive prospect because you have to provide the cover for teachers to be out. My view is that you probably have all the legislation and the framework in place. You do not probably need any more, but you need, for example, colleagues, whether that is an inspectorate level or whether it is people like me who are educating the teachers of tomorrow or whether they are school leaders, to have the convergence of interests that actually want to do this. I am not sure that we do. That is why your question to Jeremy Balfour is so important about looking at it in all the picture and not just in siloed strands. I do understand my colleagues' worry about trying to take a generic look that we are not looking at the specific. I did not think that that was what you were saying. I thought that what you were saying was not the hierarchy part of it, but unfortunately, I think that that is life at the moment. You will get individuals saying, well, that is an issue. I am really happy. I wedded it for personal reasons, for professional reasons or whatever. The convergence of interests in a school, if it is in a denominational school that is reluctant to talk about LGBTI issues, then I think that the inspectorate does have a role to ask very pointed questions about this and not to allow a getaway clause because of the context of the school. I am just talking about an example. It could be another school that is a predominantly white school that is not talking about issues of racism based on colour. It is not a very middle-class school that is avoiding issues of poverty in social class and naming those issues. Did I pick up Mr Donnelly correctly earlier when he said that, as part of teacher training qualifications, there is no health and wellbeing component in there, and I wanted to explore that. Is that part of the solution to embed that as part of a qualification? Would it address the confidence and lack of skills and so on, the issue that Gilean Yw mentioned and Bill? Would it address the issue that you mentioned as well about the time for further training in post and cover and so on? Would it help if it was embedded initially as part of the whole framework of a teaching qualification? I think that I can give a couple of examples. If I take the undergraduate degree—this is one example, but it is a fairly typical one—there are elements of every single year out of the four-year degree, and there is also a discreet element that addresses health and wellbeing. It is embedded in other areas and it has also got a discreet thing. Brian and other colleagues who come from the field and can give life to the kind of theory that we tried to share, we really welcome that. People like Brian are very willing and able to come in and help us to bring life to that. Obviously, that is really helpful. Perhaps it is helpful to have that bigger picture. For instance, if I can talk about Murray House—I am only talking about that as an example—the third year of the four-year degree has a very particular and strong focus on social justice and all the elements of that involving health and wellbeing. Bullying in many different forms is addressed directly and explicitly in there. The same would be true, but there is a shortage of time and things are more compressed if we are talking about the one year postgraduate. However, the same elements are there. Certainly, our commitment to doing that is unarguable. It is there, it should be there, it is core, it is part of the core curriculum and it is reflected in what we do in higher education institutions. There is a cultural aspect to that. I have a term that I will not spend too much time on—what I will call it—the tyranny of certain types of attainment or what attainment is, or the tyranny of the pointage for university entrance. It is about that journey. In the curriculum for excellence, for instance, we have in my view a pretty excellent and very progressive curriculum framework, which is internationally recognised as such. However, pressures from society focus on certain aspirational things, such as the pointage for university entrance. From the educational journey of a young person in preschool, and it can go all over the explore, but the nearer you get to the senior level in the secondary school is almost like a traction beam. The pointage for university entrance schools are more culturally expected to live and die by the tyranny of the pointage of university entrance. Everything else is prioritised below that, which means that when a young teacher goes into a school, there is a culture that is set by society, not by school, and that they are expected to conform to that. Therefore, other priorities kick in. That is where a lot of the good work can be undermined. It is to change that culture, and that will take time. The curriculum for excellence is a good starting point for that, but that will be a long term issue. The governance review that we will be looking at in the next few months interestingly starts to tease out really interesting questions about what attainment is and what attainment should be valued. Therefore, that tyranny to me is a bit culturally corrosive, if you see what I mean. That is a very helpful explanation, because it seemed that Mr Dunlop was saying the exact opposite of what you were saying. Chatting to some people just offline after the meeting, they were saying that teachers are coming and asking for help with those issues, despite us hearing that those issues are dealt with during their teaching. They are dealt with, but you can only do so much. In the same way that schools cannot be responsible for everything, neither can a teacher education programme. It is the culture of the school, local norms in the community and our broader societal impact. Those things are interacting all the time, as they are, in any aspect of life. It is a really good thing that we hear that people want to come back. That is certainly our experience. Being in school is where you go, goodness me. There is all this that we still need to do. That explains it very well. I think that it is particularly obvious with children that you constantly have to renew. You can have a great bullying strategy one year, but you need to go back and talk about what is bullying and what is hate crime the next year. Equally, that is true of teachers and all of us changing. I wonder whether we should be talking about all school staff, as well as the community, and not just teachers. Some of these issues have come in more recently. Prevent duty was mentioned in the round table and some concerns about how that is impacting or even the very latest political happenings. I guess that is the thing about initial training. There are always new issues and there are always issues of renewal, particularly on those kind of issues. Mary, is there a supplementary on a point here? The question that Willie Coffey asked, because I was going to ask about health and wellbeing and how much importance or inclusion was given to it in teacher training. In the previous session, Brian Donnelly had said that literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing were the core parts of training and raised the concern about health and wellbeing. Dr McCluskey, when you answered the question that my colleague asked, you said that there were elements of health and wellbeing. I wonder if you could perhaps expand and explain to me exactly what you mean by elements, because the impression that I got from the first panel was that health and wellbeing was almost a subject matter on its own. I am a bit concerned, so I might be too strong a word, but if you could perhaps clarify exactly what you mean by elements of it. There are ways in which you want to talk about health and wellbeing very generally so that you are encouraging teachers to think about children and their holistic being and their developmental stages and all of those things. We might call those health and wellbeing, but we might also, and we do, talk very specifically—when I said elements, I mean that we also talk about LGBT issues and we also talk about sexism and we also talk about racism specifically. Is that clear? That's clear. Thank you. Jeremy, I'll come back to you. I think we're following a theme and I want to continue with that theme in regard to the teacher training part of what goes on. From what we've heard over a number of weeks here and what other organisations have come to us, we would almost like to redesign completely the teacher training course. That's not for us as a committee to do, but I would be interested to know a wee bit about whether it is fit for purpose generally in regard to how we deal with all these different issues in regard to sexuality, disability, race. Are you comfortable with that? Clearly, we can't cover every small part of it. On a very general point, do you feel that we are getting the message across to teachers? Do you feel confident that my teachers are going out, particularly in the one-year course? I think that's the area perhaps. There's a lot of people who do this for one-year course, particularly primary school teaching. As you said, they're out for three or four parts of a course at school, so you've got a very limited time with them, and how do you get that across? My final question on a very specific area, I was talking to some teachers last week, and they were saying that there's no specific teaching on those who have special needs, particularly with mainstreaming, autism, that type of area. Obviously, there's more people being mainstreamed, which is a good thing, but how is your average primary school teacher equipped to deal with a child who might have special needs, whether that's autism or something else in regard to that? It's quite a long question, so apologies for that. I declare total bias in this, in my response, and in the sense that, obviously, there's somebody with a social justice background. I can only talk about education in Edinburgh, but I think that what I'm trying to do with our teacher education programmes, and in the new one that we're launching next year at a master's level, is reorientate so that key issues that are important such as social justice such as digital literacy, such as an ability to have statistical literacy, care for the environment are core, they are the central pillars, and you work classroom management around that, you work your subject content areas around that, rather than actually saying, well, here's what I have to do, discipline or whatever you want to call it, and then, oh, by the way, we'll think about the social justice element and we'll think about the statistical literacy or the digital element. I think you flip it and you do it the other way, so there is no get out clause. Now, that's a hard one, because I'm not necessarily, and I'll be absolutely honest, it's a winning of hearts and minds of my own colleagues in getting to that stage, because not everybody understands that, and not everybody would want to do that, so, and I think the other word is embedding. So if you're actually doing, well, say, classroom management or lesson planning, how do you consider these issues when you're doing that? So it's not an add-on. I think that's a different way of thinking than the traditional way of thinking, and the other also is if you're in secondary, particularly where people are quite, that their identities are wrapped up with a subject area, it's even more potentially difficult with areas like modern studies or English or history or geography, you can kind of see that in. But hey, you know, if I'm teaching about copper, I'm teaching about copper, what are you talking to me about these issues? And I think, well, actually, your laboratory, your social spaces, your classroom and learning spaces, your pedagogy also has to think about inclusion issues. So actually, no, you can't get away from that. So that's any push you can give as a committee to actually getting people to really think about how these issues are central as part of our education. So it's not quite a completely throw baby out with the bathwater, I think, it's a repositioning. In terms of things like autism, well, if you reposition, then those things will be in there as part of core. I'm just slightly, can this piece be slightly very quick? I know we are against time. I mean, I'm slightly worried that you're saying to me, we've got to, you know, something like autism, we've got to turn it around because that gives the indication to me that if I'm doing teacher training last year or doing teacher training this year, that's not been covered. No, it is being covered, but it should be covered with far more time to it. You know, I think at the moment my colleagues who do actually teach in areas like autism would probably say that they're quite pressed and they might have to do it in the one session. And there lies actually some of the, I think, at classroom level in schools, some of the problems as well, because some of these issues are being dealt with, but being dealt with in a way that's quite quick. So we might have three sessions in Sikhism and you happen to be sick in those three sessions, you don't get it. So you then mistake many years later everybody who's brown as being Muslim. So do you see how the follow-through occurs? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any other questions from our members? Is there anything else from the panel that you think maybe we should cover? Bill? I think, and Kay touched on this, is the issue of the prevent a strategy in terms of how it's impacting in certain communities. That is something I think you need to tease out a little. I can reference a fairly wide coverage of the issue in last week's test TESS. It was last week, it was all mainly based on stuff from down south, but it's a good, it's well worth a read some of the issues that need to be teased out in that regard because we have the curriculum for excellence, we have get it right for every school, the prevent strategy, there was a human rights committee in the commons and the lords, our old party committee that put a question mark on it, so that area needs to be looked at. One of the other areas that's been brought to your attention for this committee's general work that we're doing, given we're new and expanded remit and the new equality duties and things like that that we have to look at, and especially with the human rights filter on all of what we do, is that one of the road maps that we should use is the UN concluding observations, and we've obviously got some up to date UN concluding observations from the UN in the summer, which reflect maybe some of the challenges that we've all heard about this morning and give us maybe some criteria where we could improve and start to tackle and target and do that. I wonder whether any of you have done any work on the UN concluding observations and whether there's any other guidance you can give us on the specific recommendations in those observations? No? Dr Kay? Some comments. Clearly, the Convention on the Rights of the Child is one of those that concludes observations, and as we know, actually, the committee was quite pointed about the topics. Make specific points about teacher training. Yes. I copied out the building ones that happened to put that in the evidence within that, and they specifically mentioned that amongst other things in terms of dressing schools. They also picked out the prevent duty. I know Alex Cole-Hamilton knows it very well, and they also picked out cyber building amongst other things. I think also, and I know it's within the room of the committee going slightly outwith, but I think it's still relevant, is we know our qualities does not adequately cover age discrimination for children, and that does come out in the building issue because sometimes it's, and the hate crime comparison, so it's bullying. It's kind of like, oh, well, children have always experienced that. That's where an age discrimination point comes in because it's not okay. I don't expect to be bullied now as an adult. Children should not expect to be bullied. So I think that's where some of those edge of those concluding observations can really show us opportunities. Excellent. Thank you so much for that. It allows us just to start exploring some of those avenues as well. Can I again extend our thanks to your evidence this morning? Again, as we said to the first panel, this is a scoping exercise. We're obviously looking to do a piece of work on this, but we'll take into reflection. We'll take Dr Rowena's guidance here, and we're going to reflect on what we've heard this morning and decide how we can learn from that and maybe push some of the agenda forward. But I wish to thank you on behalf of the committee very much, and we hope to see you all again. We'll be working with you. Thank you. I now suspend the committee to go into private.