 Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the sixth meeting of the Education and Culture Committee in 2016. Can I remind all those present to ensure that all electronic devices are switched off? Our first item is to take evidence on school spending and the educational attainment gap over the past year or so. We have taken a considerable amount of evidence on these overlapping topics, but in doing so we obviously understand that much more information is now in the public domain and we hope that this will help to stimulate an open and transparent discussion. There were last two reports on the Scottish Government's draft budgets of both focus on school spending and we have been told about some of the challenges facing local authorities and schools. We have also been told that there is not always a clear link between spending on education and the outcomes that this delivers. One outcome that I trust that all those with an interest in education share is that the attainment gap between the least and the most disadvantaged pupils should be narrowed significantly. I hope that this morning's discussion will help us to understand how we can make best progress on that shared aim. With that in mind, I welcome to the committee Councillor Stephanie Primrose, Councillor Robert Nicolle, Councillor Paul Godzick, the City of Edinburgh Council, Councillor Gary Robinson, the Chetland Islands Council, Councillor Malcolm Cunning from Glasgow City Council and Ian Robertson, also Glasgow City Council. I welcome all of you to the committee this morning and thank you for agreeing to come along and discuss this important subject with us. I am going to go straight to questions from members and I believe that Gordon has got the first question. Thank you very much, convener. There is no doubt that there has been pressure on local authority budgets over recent years. However, in terms of educational attainment, there has been a 6.3 per cent increase in the percentage of pupils achieving five-plus awards at SQA level 6 since 2010-11, and four percentage points increases in young people entering positive destinations upon leaving school hitting 93 per cent. How do we balance the situation where ultimately there has been pressure on the education budget but we are still achieving good educational outcomes? I will come back to that. Of course you are correct about the 93 per cent of positive destinations. I would like to raise one point, and there are a number of points that I would probably want to go back to as well, is that we do have positive destinations but I think we need to actually break that down a wee bit further. I think we actually need to look at sustainable destinations. I think that, from my own authority, we have got 97 per cent going into the sustainable positive destinations. I would like to see in six months time whether we are still there. That is one point that I would like to make sure that no-one else wants to come in. I will just make the point about positive destinations. I think that it is at a good point and it is something that we are looking to improve constantly. Edinburgh obviously had a specific situation. Edinburgh bought them at the league table just a few years ago. We put in a specific resources round about the Edinburgh guarantee. We have got a commitment right across the city to buy into that, and we are now thankfully at the Scottish average. There needs to be a sustained focus on it. Edinburgh guarantee and things like that are helping to improve that figure. I echo Stephanie's point there. Shirland in recent times has topped the table for positive destinations. Part of that has been due to the high level of well-paid employment that has been in the islands lately, particularly through the construction phase of the Shirland gas plant. Seeing those positive destinations, we also saw a drop in people going to higher and further education. My belief is that a number of people took a gap here and went to make themselves some money rather than get themselves into student loan debt. We have yet to see if that comes through in the next set of figures, but there certainly is not the amount of available work that was two or three years ago. I think that it is one to watch. I am not sure if it can be sustained. Clearly, the situation in Glasgow is one where we have knocked around the bottom of the table for a number of years, but certainly in recent years we have improved Glasgow year on year, but we have also closed the gap in comparison with other local authorities. That is a positive outcome for both Glasgow and, more particularly, for Glasgow students. We still have numbers—I think that it is 90 per cent—a roughly positive destination, and most of those figures are reasonably comparable. The one where we stand out slightly is that there is still a higher proportion of school students in Glasgow going straight from school into unemployment, and that would be one where the Scottish average is around 5 per cent and we are 7.5 or something. It is roughly that sort of area, and that would be a particular concern. Has really been achieved by changes in working practice by many of the teachers, taking good examples from some of the schools that have very successfully turned around their achievements in terms of exam success and outcomes, and taking those achievements out across the entire school provision in the city? In a Glasgow context, I arrived in Glasgow in 2008, and it was not because I arrived, but since 2008, because of the collective leadership that both political and officer led, that has been a step change in terms of why Glasgow has progressed since then. I am a very practical person, so what I saw when I first arrived in Glasgow was quite a patchwork in terms of the quality of teaching that was going on. One of the first leadership challenges was that media rocketry will not be tolerated, in other words, you have looked to be the best you can be, so that was a big drive in terms of making sure that. The other critical thing, quite frankly, is the collective leadership in our schools. Again, that was quite mixed. I would say that we have some outstanding head teachers now, so those two things alone, the quality of leadership and the quality of teaching that goes on in the classroom, are the most profound things that will make a difference. I agree with you that the quality of leadership is important, because I know that in the Western Hills Education Centre, in my constituency, they turned around their exam results, and that was about attitude and quality of leadership, and then it changed it around. In terms of seeing an increase in what pupils are achieving and the positive destinations, what impact has the investment in school estate had? We have had over 600 schools rebuild over the past eight years, and the number of schools in a bad condition have dropped from 134 in 2008 to 11 in 2015. What impact has that had, or is it purely about leadership that has pushed the achievements that we have seen? Help with that, and then colleagues can jump in. On the specific point of the school estate, it is actually quite hard to say that if you refurbish or rebuild x number of schools, that gives you extra turn in terms of attainment. I do not think that the evidence is there. Clearly, if you improve the educational environment, that is helpful towards what you are trying to achieve in terms of outcomes for children. However, I am sure that colleagues here would say that it is not the clenching factor. There is a range of things, including quality of teaching practice within the school, leadership within the school, the performance system that authorities and Education Scotland can bring. There are a range of levers in there that are probably stronger than simply renovating the school estate. Your first question was about the link between pound-spent and attainment. Clearly, at some level, there is a link there, but it is not a direct thing if you spend a number that gives you a better return in terms of it. There is evidence that the OECD picks up on that it is what you spend your money on, rather than the quantity overall. It is about how councils have that flexibility to be able to target resources at those areas that they feel are necessary to get the best return in terms of local outcomes. In terms of the school estate, it is one of many ingredients. To be perfectly honest, as Robert Brown said, it is not the main ingredient. I would say that teachers and leadership are the main ingredients in terms of raising attainment. However, if you look at the facilities that we are delivering now, the learning environment and the opportunities that that brings for pupils to learn in different and innovative ways, clearly improving the school estate is part of a big picture. I will make a point about the school estate. You are talking about attainment, but we have a number of schools that we are looking at. Achievement is not necessary about getting your S5 hiers, as is in one of our state-of-the-art special needs schools. It is things about the hydrotherapy pools. When they make a huge difference to young people who have severe learning difficulties and severe physical disabilities, they might not come out with five hiers, but they come out with a better film of welfare. I would like to make one point because I am not what has touched on it. Our teaching profession has changed. We have a far more focused view on our pupils. We look at the Crick and For Excellence. The Crick and For Excellence is about individuals. I think that our staff and our headteachers know our individuals. Through the Crick and For Excellence that those individuals have been targeted, they have been encouraged and they have gone into what they want to go into. We are moving from having success only in English maths. You have been seen as what people want. It is embracing the wider context so that we have people in hospitality. We do not have a school that has a barista in it. We are going to do mix ecology. I am not quite sure what that is. We are catering for individuals. I think that is a huge leap. I saw you a while ago, but when I was at school that was not the case. You started, then you copied from the board. Now we have teachers who are really looking at how individuals learn, looking at their own styles, looking at how lessons are delivered. I think that is key as well to raising entertainment. Over the past couple of months, we have seen a fierce reaction to the local government settlement, especially the impact that that could very likely have on education. Perhaps much of that protest has come from Labour-controlled authorities. In that respect, because of its own submission, even taking on board the process of setting a budget, it is still to be finalised. In your report, you talk about what a cash cut will mean for education. The most vulnerable could be hard to sit. There will be a human cost to the Government's decision. Could you perhaps tell me what kind of specific examples of how the change in total resource for councils might impact on school services? Kick off from one of the Labour-controlled councils, where clearly we haven't settled our budget entirely and won't settle our budget until March 10. Over a two-year period, we are looking at savings of £133 million out of Glasgow City Council's entire budget. That is bound to have an effect on education, even though clearly we have a commitment A to stick to the guidelines in terms of teacher numbers and a political commitment to maintaining services, particularly as far as possible within social work and education. In the budgeting process, what we have to look at are other costs within education, whether that is specific music and art provision. We are having to look at staff support in terms of additional support for learning in some of the schools. As I said, decisions have not been made in that, but what you may well find is that there are fewer support staff within the schools, and therefore teachers are standing at the photocopier rather than standing in the classroom. There is no way that local authorities can save some £133 million over the space of two years, and there is not some level of impact in terms of the educational provision. Clearly, there is a commitment to try and make sure that that impacts as little as possible on the learning experience of individual students in our schools, whether that is primary, secondary or nursery, but it is going to be very difficult to achieve. I am an independent councillor leading an independent council, but I think that we have experienced exactly the same thing. We have said many of the same things that Labour councils have said. It is going to be extremely difficult. I am a bit annoyed at having recently heard ministers talking about a 1 per cent cut to local government. I am sorry, but I do not know that council. I do not recognise it. If I could put some figures on the table for my own council, we have seen the biggest cut in local government expenditure this year of 5.1 per cent cash. Our budget is just over £100 million. Our grant in the current financial year was £87 million. Our grant in the next financial year is going to be £82 million. We are getting about a £1 million share of health and social care integration money, so you do the maths. I cannot give that anywhere near to 1 per cent that has been quoted. It is far more significant than that. My council has been at pains to protect education spending up until now, but I doubt very much that we can continue that into the future if something has got to give. It has become extremely difficult to maintain the level of education expenditure when we are maintaining teacher numbers, when it is extremely difficult to close schools, or amalgamate schools. I think that local government is being given a very difficult proposition here. Is it difficult to see if there are future cuts on how those can be dealt with? I agree with the last two contributions. We set a budget very early this year. It is an SNP and Labour coalition, but we set it with great difficulty. Over the budget framework, 16 to 20, we expect to take £140 million out of the local government budget in Edinburgh for 16 to 17. We are looking at £11 million worth of savings over the communities and families directorate. That obviously covers education, but it also covers children's social works and CLD. I will go back to the contributions that previous colleagues made. Yes, we are doing so every turn trying to protect direct education spending. We have given a commitment to the devolved school management budget, which goes directly to headteachers, but around the edges there is a real impact. That may be music tuition, that may be pupil support. Those are things that we are having to look at just because of the scale of the budget reductions. I agree with my colleagues around the table that we will have to look at what we consider perithril. We are talking about music and school transport. As you are aware, that has a statutory element to it, but one of the things that really concerns me—I will not apologise for raising that again—is that our most vulnerable children, who really require services through social work, through educational psychologists, through family workers, case workers and things like that, will be the services that we have to look at because we are having to protect our core. I think that we really need to take that into consideration. If we want our young children to achieve what they want to achieve, what they can achieve, they need to be safe, they need to be healthy and they need to be emotionally able to cope with education, and that is where my big concern is that that service may be the one that is taking a hit. The 16-17 budget setting difficulty is that local authorities are having at the moment. We cannot ignore the compound effect over the past eight years. If I quote Glasgow figures, they will be broadly similar with other local authorities. Since 2008, the education service has had to reduce its budget by £70 million, so that is about 13 per cent. If you use that well-won phrase, although the whole hanging fruit has already gone, you are now actually cutting into core services. Having been in this game for 30 odd years, my concern now is about some of the really good work that we have done around early intervention right across Scotland, and that is where we are going to make the generational change, the generational impact, those are the services that are going to be vulnerable. I think that if I tie it into teacher numbers, for example, in terms of how we are funded, because there is also that context in terms of what nationally has been supported and then what local decisions are made around about what they want to do in terms of priority. Glasgow has got a very large nurture programme and within your papers you have got all the context in terms of how effective nurture programme—that is early intervention. Glasgow spends about £4 million a year on its nurture programme, with massive impact and improvement in children's outcomes, but it is not part of the settlement. That is a local decision. We will be held to account for that as part of our teacher number. It is a local decision, but it has been held to account nationally for something that is not funded. I think that the witnesses for giving some specific and indeed some peripheral answers there, but with regard to the attainment gap, do you see that the cutback in budget having an impact on that? What I am thinking in particular is that, while we have got to keep up the teacher numbers and the teacher numbers need the support, do you think that the budget reduction is going to have an impact on the support that the teachers need? Yes. Teachers have a job to do. If we cut back on things like cash on assistance and the support that we have in, teachers will have to deal more and more with that type of thing. Teachers will have to deal with all the emotional baggage that children have. They are not social workers, they are not councillors. As we cut back on those services, teachers will be under increasing strain to deal with some of the really complex issues. Some of the children that I have come across, I did not have on my radar, are some of the complexities that come from, their backgrounds that come from poverty. If we can talk about poverty within our society, that is where we need to make changes as well. If I can add something as well. The reduction that local government face will not make closing the attainment gap any easier, that goes without saying. When you look at, as we have said often enough, evidence of what does close gaps like that comes in. You cannot really say that it is any one thing. Clearly, there is an element of what happens within schools and that comes down to the leadership within the school. It comes within the actions of individual teachers but you cannot isolate the school from wider services that councils deliver, delivered by the voluntary sector as well. All of that goes in to tackling the attainment gap. When you isolate elements like teacher numbers, as we have said often enough, when you look at the variation that we have seen in Scotland over the years, there is no evidence to suggest that the changes in teacher numbers actually make some material difference in terms of attainment. There is no one single solution to that, but when you are constrained in terms of overall funding, with your flexibilities reduced in terms of how you can redirect funding locally, that must have an impact on the things that you can do locally to tackle things like the attainment gap. Unless you have got something radically different to say, no. Times against us this morning, I do not want. It is a big panel and six people say the same thing, if you do not mind. It does not really get us anywhere, so I want to keep us moving on. You are okay, John? I am sorry for sneezing or sniffing on the way through, but I would like to carry on from some of the questions that John was asking there. We obviously live in an environment where obviously the Scottish Government has had devastating cuts from Westminster Government, and we are not going to have that debate right here right now. We are in a situation where we are trying to deal with the future and education as well. As a former councillor myself, I am a great believer in even though we live in challenging times, even though I believe that it is a difficult settlement, but it is a fair settlement that local government has got. It has always been that way in my experience as a local councillor in the past. However, where are the big ideas? Where are the solutions? I believe that there are no such things as problem-only solutions. I think that it is mainly because my mother brought me up on a diet of John Lennon records. Apart from that, where are the solutions? Where are the big ideas coming from local government to try and make the challenging situation better? All that I have heard is about the difficulties that you have got with the budget. Where are the big ideas? I know that they are out there, and I know that local government is always at the forefront when it comes to these innovative ideas. In lots of local authorities, there are lots of ideas. There are either ideas that have been developed within the local authority or ideas that have been developed across the teaching profession and the education establishment. In Glasgow, for example, the improvement challenge across the secondary estate, Ian has already described the nurturing programme, because there is the absolute, accepted idea that the earlier you can get in and start improving educational attainment, that is going to have an outcome in 14 years down the line. The gap for those who come from the most impoverished parts of our inner city areas—Glasgow has got more of them than anyone else—can be around a year at the age of five. We have got to do something around that area. There are loads of work going on in education within local authorities, in my local authority and in other local authorities. That cannot be done or maintained without significant financial investment, freeing up time for teachers to be able to do some of that new, imaginative and innovative work. The pressure on teachers' time as a result of cuts, as we have already described, in other support areas is going to make that exceedingly more difficult. I agree with that. I think that there are ideas out there. There is fantastic practice going on in schools across the city and across the country. However, to add to the point that has just been made, if you constrain the flexibility through increasing Scottish Government directions on how we direct our resources, that innovation, those ideas, will not come through to fruition. I think that we have some very good things that show really good practices about sharing those practices. I want to pick up two and mention the third. We have two extremely well-thought-out things that are working very well. Those are developing the young workforce programme. That is bringing together a private sector, a third sector and a huge amount of expertise. That is having benefits for our young people, because that is experts helping our young people through business. I do accept the fact that earlier years are critical, and I would like to take the fact that, just to identify the work of our years collaborative, I do not both co-chair them. I think that we are both very good examples of how we can think together and do something big. As others have said, the ideas are out there. My own council started work in the Shetland Learning Partnership before the Inc was even dry on Sir Ian Wood's report. That has been an excellent initiative that has been held by Skills Development Scotland as being one of the best that they have seen. We have a process whereby we are actually bringing young folk on to get them involved in work, in vocational education at an early stage when they are still in school. I think that it is hugely helpful as well, because the pilot scheme that we started last year was focused on social care and engineering. Those are two areas that, as council and local employers, there is real difficulty in recruiting. Those young folk are going to leave school with vocational qualification as well as their academic qualification, so they are well suited to enter the labour market. As part of the programme as well, all of the children, all of the young folk that are involved in it have got a summer placement scheme, so they are learning skills in a workplace that they can then take on to their career. I think that the ideas are very much out there, but I echo what others have said. It is about giving local government the flexibility to bring those things forward. I agree with you. I think that challenge actually brings opportunity and some of the ideas that we might have thought 10 years ago were unthinkable are now actually on the table. We have mentioned earlier that senior phase is a massive area for some quite radical reform, some of it is already in train, some of it is yet to come. I do think that senior phase is a very expensive component part of education. If you want to put the account in a minute, it can be a very inefficient part of the curriculum. When you are sitting down with your secondary head teachers and saying that if your raison d'etre is to optimise choice for young people, you cannot have schools as islands. That is how they have been working for years. They try to be all things to all people, and invariably I am the person who gets complaints about why cannot my daughter do three sciences at that school because we cannot offer it. It is a city context as much as anything else. There are far more radical models coming forward now in looking at, for example, advanced higher hubs. You will be moving youngsters about the city at any point during the day so that you can get a decent cohort of youngsters doing the same subject. We will be moving some of the advanced higher programmes and higher programmes, minority hires, into twilight activity. The soft benefits from that as well because those young people need to start thinking about how they are matured and move on to their next stage of learning. They need to be far more self-sufficient and resilient in terms of all that movement. That is quite doable in a city context because you are never more than a mile away from a local authority. We are going to be forced down the greater use of technology as part of the learning experience and means that it has been about since open university. However, if you take a very pragmatic view at the moment, if you cannot get a physics teacher to love their money, why can't you have a virtual one? We are going to be pushed down using certain very practical challenges that we face at the moment, but I think that the senior phase in itself will probably give us some of the most radical reforms that we have seen in the education service in many a year. Thank you, George. Now we are talking because I am loving the positivity from everybody there as well. If we are talking about the flexibility, can we not create the flexibility in local government? As a former councillor again, the Holy Grail was always joint services and working together, not reinventing the wheel, not restructuring local authorities, but more about working together more cleverly, even if I can't say it. Possibly that is a way forward for us all. I know that we have discussed this before and some of you have been here before, but surely there is a way that we can use back-of-house services to work together or some other ways in education that we can find a way to create that flexibility that you all need to try to deliver the service that we all want? I think that that is right about having greater flexibility. One of the things that we have, which goes back to the point that was made already, is that we need to bring our colleges in. We need to, if we can, share our education with our colleges as well. One thing that I would say about the shared services is that we are very lenient at the moment. A lot of the cuts that we have taken across councils are coming from the management structures, so I would be concerned about the workload on our managers there. From one point of view, we have gone from seven heads of service to one. If you had that across Pan-Asia in my example, it would be a huge, huge job, and I do not know that we would be any better off for it. I think that what we do at the moment is actually very good. Do we need to change that? Surely it is not necessarily about the point that George is making. It is not about one manager running Pan-Asia services, but surely you could have, for example, a single payroll system, a single finance department across Asia. Do you have that now? I am not an expert on ICT at all. I do not think so. I will say that I may get asked what was coming in this. From what I thought, I thought that councils are just different. Clearly, there is an appetite within councils to share services where we can be shared. We have given examples before of pan-T-side authorities that are looking to share services around language learning. The point that we have wanted to make around this is that councils have been doing a variety of things around efficiencies for a great number of years, both in terms of internal authorities and integrating services, but also working with health boards and the like. We are just moving into the next phase of integrating services around health and social care. The idea that there is an integrated thinking both within councils and across is completely wrong. Then it comes down to the savings that can probably be delivered by the likes of shared services. We have not seen any convincing case made that the sorts of things that you are talking about could deliver the significant savings that you would maybe want and certainly would not be helpful in meeting the challenges that we are currently facing. Share services are not a panacea, as we have said before, to the challenges that are faced by local government. It is interesting to note that the Scottish Government's response says that it has not suggested anything like what you have brought up there. I think that if it thought that there was a case to be made for that, it would have made that stronger in its response. We will see what happens in the future. Many of those questions, Robert, are questions that now finally have to be faced. Nobody has suggested that it was a panacea, but all of those discussions now have to take place about how we operate and how we operate as efficiently as possible. It is a perfectly reasonable question to raise. Gordon, do you have a supplementary? Are you okay with that? The last commentary about shared services in Ayrshire is particularly important when they just split up a very successful tourism team across the three Ayrshars into three separate units. I agree with the questions that George Adam put in terms of the can-do. I am not saying that a lot has not been done, but the can-do attitude of how we optimise the services such as ICT, etc. Councils, one of the things that we talked about in terms of delivering the best results that has been mentioned this morning is the leadership skills and how they are applied. Considering that, I just wonder if, in looking at the improvement services benchmarking report, that there are individual variations in per pupil spend across the country. In fact, you have just alluded to that, in fact, how different it is. The variation provides opportunities to explore how some services are designed and delivered, maybe shared, in ways that achieve greater efficiencies in expenditure. I wonder if you can share with us the reasons for the variation between different local authorities and what action has been taken to address this. For example, where there are certain Glasgow's nurture programme, the very success is how are we sharing the outcomes, the beneficial outcomes that each council delivers a programme that clearly has some impact on attainment. How are we sharing that across Scotland via the councils? It is used through the professional body association of directors of education in Scotland that it has what they describe as a series of networks. You will have the early years network, you will have the curriculum and teaching network and that is an initial vehicle in order for local authorities to showcase and share some of the innovative and high performing services that have been designed. We are still, as a society, a bit caleyard. If we have a good idea, we quite like to keep it to ourselves in case anybody, because it is all about how you compare on a league table. If you share your good idea, somebody might catch up with you. Does that not validate what we have just discussed? If you have a good idea, you like to keep it in your own caleyard? Absolutely. I think that that is something that we are getting better at, but we need to be far more open. I think that sometimes it is just in our human nature that we do not like to brag even when we are doing something well or good. I think that it goes beyond that. It is more to do with turf wars and personalities. How do we encourage the sharing of the knowledge across Scotland? To give credit with credit is due. The Scottish Government's attainment challenge will do just that. When you look at the range of innovative practice that has been brought forward right across my own city in Edinburgh and across Scotland, it will assist us in looking at what works and hopefully promoting that right across the country. I do not dismiss a limited amount of investment, but it is investment that will help and will assist us to share good practice. I just want to pick up on the variation in costs. That is a very good question, but, in my own respect, my local authority still has the highest cost per pupil in the whole of Scotland. There is very little that we can do about that at the moment. Some of that comes from transport costs. Some of our children have to be brought to school by aircraft, flowing in to secondary school and put up in accommodation through the week. Another thing is the number of schools that we have. We have 31 schools, six of which are secondary schools. The Western Isles has a land mass twice that of Shetland and has, I think, 24 schools at the last count, three secondary schools. There are costs right there. People to teach their ratios have a significant impact on that. The number of schools has a significant impact on that. The Audit Scotland report in education in 2014 gave an analysis round about urban and rural authorities. That was very useful, because there are distinct challenges in rural authorities that we in Edinburgh do not have to meet. In terms of attainment, when you compare cost per pupil to attainment, we in Edinburgh are round about the bottom in terms of the league table and cost per pupil, but our outcomes are good. Our attainment is continually rising. It has been rising over the last number of years. I want to very briefly come back to the issue of leadership skills. I know of one school in here where the headmaster shows inordinate leadership skills, and that is reflected in the attainment of pupils. How are we finding those who have the skills to lead the schools and develop the skills, the sharing of knowledge and virtual classrooms? How do we find those people? You cannot train people to be leaders, in my view. How do you find those people? It is on the last bit. I am a trained teacher, but for many, many, many years ago, I was not a teacher for very long. However, I think that you can train and support some of the leadership skills. I think that the training centres, whether it is at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen or whatever, can contribute to that. Above that, through the professional organisations, through the trade unions and so on, we are sharing some of the experience and sharing skills and ideas that come from individual teachers. I am not going to name them, but I could name schools in Glasgow, where clearly individual headteachers have made a very, very significant difference, turned schools around, and that has been used as an exemplar to other senior staff in other schools. That has happened across the board, but it is not simply local authorities. I still think that the old colleges, the education centres, the teachers' training and so on have got something to do with that, and we can build on individuals. What you are never going to do is absolutely replicate, time after time, that outstanding individual who will always exist in every local authority from time to time. Someone will come forward and you just go, that person has got a certain something. You might not be able to train that, but I think that you can train some of the leadership skills and some of the leadership approaches that are important. I appreciate that. I do understand that there is a lot of training that goes on in terms of management skills. What I am talking about is somebody with the innovation, the strategic outlook. Do you have anything that you are a Government that you had to add? Paul, did you want to come in? Just a general comment. The Scottish Government, quite rightly, has seen school leadership as a key priority, and there will be a scale that will be looking at developing leaders of the future, and that has the huge potential. To parallel, Glasgow has what is called the Suspiring Heads programme, and that is accessible from principal teacher upwards. They are recruited by end interview, assessment and they are invested in over a three-year period. Part of that will be round about—it is not textbook learning—it is about being mentored by good head teachers that are already in existence. I am still struggling to understand what the formula for good leadership is, because you see it in so many different forms. You can have two high performing schools that have different types of leadership in both schools, both equally successful but with quite different personalities. Certainly, our view is that the more evaluation coming back is for those aspiring head teachers who are principal teachers or deputes. It is a formal linkage with a head teacher mentor that has given the biggest dividends. Sometimes it is not up to about the visionary leadership, it is about the practical day-to-day leadership, about dealing with crisis and parental concerns. Sometimes that can be equally as important in how you engage with your community. The most effective schools are those who are looking out towards their community. One thing that I would say, and it is taking it into a slightly broader context, is that if you want to bring in good leaders through the system, you would start an early age, and certainly things like the Duke of Edinburgh awards, things like the leadership qualifications that go on in secondary schools, not just to help that young person, but at some point they will filter in through the system. That is my point about scaling things when they are being made. Thank you. I think that we will just move on to that stage then. Liam, I will just bring you in then. Paul, you mentioned the attainment challenge and I think clearly that has much to commend it. The concern is that, against a backdrop of closing the endowment gap completely, the exclusion of a living local authorities, including Garry's and my own, makes it difficult to understand how, without that resource, you will be able to address the attainment challenges that exist in Shetland, in Orkney and in local authorities across the country. I am interested to know how you would see that being addressed. I do not expect you to answer for the Government, but in a sense it does seem the anomaly within a setup that is there partially to deliver the outcome of closing the attainment gap completely. Obviously, Corsula has expressed concerns in regards to how it has been rolled out. What I can say in terms of the plans that are coming forward, red and broad, I am quite excited about them. I think that they will make a benefit, but I will hand over to Robert because obviously there has been a concern in terms of Corsula's position in terms of how this has been rolled out across the country. We have made a few points around the attainment challenge. At one level, any money is welcome, but I suppose that there are a couple of points around the scale of the challenge. I think that when you look at even £100 million over five years, that is not to be sniffed at, but it is small when you compare to what is spent locally on education. It is also that this is very much a schools-based programme. I think that when we have been talking a lot about the other services that go into really helping improvement, not of which really happened within the school. Clearly, there is a concern for us that directing resources specifically at a number of authorities and specifically at a number of schools, albeit that they may deliver some benefits there, is neglecting those wider services that could do with the investment as well. I think that we have also raised concerns just about the nature of how it came about and the fact that it came out without really any local government involvement. Given that it is directly at local government, that came as something of a surprise, but you can hear from others how it is going to be spent. I suspect that Glasgow will want to say something about that as well. I can just add a little bit of context in terms of Edinburgh. Across our primary schools, we spend about £3 million a year on what we call positive action funding, funding to tackle poverty and inequality within our schools. The Scottish attainment challenge is providing around about £300,000. On the scale and context that you can see, that is not to say that the funding that is being provided will not be put to good use. That undoubtedly will help those children in those situations, but it is not a huge amount of funding. I think that it is a good point that is raised. My concern is that, by not consistently funding all 32 local authorities, we will close the attainment gap, but sadly not in a positive way. We could close the attainment gap and do less well. My fear is that if we see our funding consistently cut, that might be what happens. My local authority has seen real-term reductions in funding in excess of 25 per cent since 2010, yet we have managed to maintain and increase the percentage of our remaining budget that we spend in education. We are trying, but it is getting increasingly more difficult. My fear is that our high attainment will come down. To the agreement around people-teacher ratios, it came up in the context of the pressures that are coming down the track in terms of budget reductions for next year and, presumably, years subsequently. George invited a can-do, solutions-orientated approach to that. Presumably, you would argue that one of the ways of increasing the likelihood of that was to involve greater flexibility around the way in which teacher numbers and people-teacher ratios are managed. If that is the case, how would you envisage that working? I think that everybody thinks that an education service is dominated by teachers as the predominant workforce. If you take a core education service from earlier through to just so that we are learning, teachers only represent about 50 per cent of the workforce. It is more than teachers that make an impact and make a difference. If you asked teachers in terms of whether they would resolutely protect teacher numbers at all cost, I would say that the vast majority would say that it is about the blended workforce that they require in order to do that. If you think about it in the context of devolved school management, because our hands are tied in terms of protecting teacher numbers, and the scheme of devolved school management, some teachers are coming up with really weird posts now, so they are principal teachers of employability and skills, because that is about them aligning to the DIY agenda. They would be better employing somebody with a completely different background and maybe a careers skills development-type background employing that directly. Let's be crass about it, that would be cheaper than employing a teacher, but you might actually get a better impact and a better outcome as a consequence of it. So teachers are going to be absolutely critical to closing that gap, but it needs to be far more focused on what that blended workforce is. A lot of headteachers in primary schools will tell you actually, give me more support for learning workers, it can actually work more directly with young people in terms of that intervention and that will have a better impact than actually just mean, absolutely resolutely just making me protect teacher numbers. I mean, we had a session with some of your colleagues leading up to these evidence sessions, and one of the points that was made was that what the agreement is resulting in is reduction numbers in terms of classroom assistance, additional support for learning assistance. I mean, they appeared to be talking at that stage about a situation that was already in play rather than one that is likely to emerge with the impending cuts. Are you able to provide any kind of detail around what the impact has been in relation to classroom assistance, additional support for learning assistance? Drawing on the improvement service benchmarking report within there, I think that that draws on official Government statistics. It says since 2010 that there has been a reduction in the number of support staff in primary school by 3.2 per cent and secondary schools by 8.4 per cent, including a 2.1 per cent reduction in additional support needs staff. It does go on in saying that there has been an actual rise in the number of classroom assistance in there, so those are just statistics. Clearly, there could be reasons why that is in there, but it is some information that is already in the public domain. I wonder if you might be able to talk us through what the implications are in relation to the sanctions around teacher numbers. I think that one of the concerns that we have heard is that a failure to hit the teacher numbers may not be the result of a lack of willingness or indeed a lack of attempts to recruit those teachers, but simply an inability to recruit either in specific subjects or across the piece. It would be helpful for me to get a better understanding as to what the implications have been for specific local authorities in that respect. It is quite frustrating, because it sends its day, so it is a count on a day, and you might get a different number the day after. We were short by 45 teachers. The evidence base was absolute resolute in terms of what we were going to. We actually wanted to over recruit because of its length in terms of the attainment fund, so we were trying to be ahead of the game in terms of recruiting additional teachers. We were short by 45 on the day, and that resulted in a £900,000 penalty, which we have had to fund within this year's budget, so there has been a consequence of that in order to do that. The difficulty, from our point of view, is that there has been an ability to recruit teachers at the time. We cannot get mass physics subjects for love nor money. We really struggle in the domination sector in primary schools, but if you asked us how many teachers we had two weeks on from the September census, we would be up by about another 35 on that point. The census date in September is very difficult in terms of our all local authorities, because although you think that you have your schools fully staff for the end of June, there is a whole churn over the summer as staff get promoted posts, as they decide to take offers in other authorities and whatever. You are coming back in the middle of August, and you have two or three weeks to try to get your numbers up. Relatively straightforward fix, is it not? That does not require a move away either from numbers or indeed from ratio, but simply some way of capturing a point-in-time assessment. Given the implications of falling on the wrong side, the line there is significant, but a point-in-time assessment is too blunt an instrument that you need something that maybe captures what the situation is over the course of it. I can understand the commitment to maintain teacher numbers, but using the raw tool of census day is the wrong tool. I think that you should be looking at what our local authority has been doing over the year in order to do that as well. If you think that the financial burden or penalty that has happened this year, if you look at the agreement for 16, 17 and beyond, the penalty could be quite horrendous. An arbitrary figure on a given day, and I do not think that that is any way to deliver the outcomes that we both jointly want to see. What leads to arbitrary? I do not know in terms of how the Scottish Government decided the ratio figure. I do not know if there is any research basis that states that that is the optimum amount of staff to deliver the best education for children in Scotland. I am taking right across Scotland as well, if I might. We are at 10 to 1. Are we really going to be penalised if Scotland does not make the 13.6 to 1 target overall? I would take a serious issue if the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Deputy First Minister came back to me and said that he was going to penalise my council for maintaining the ratio 10 to 1. That goes to the sort of arbitrary rain that was mentioned. I think that there are two problems. One is that there is no consensus around the idea that those pupil-teacher ratios have any basis in educational attainment. There are clearly arguments over that and discussions over that, and different people will take them, and different educational experts may take somewhat different positions on it. However, there is also the arbitrary date. Whatever your opinion in terms of pupil-teacher ratios, you could improve what the Scottish Government is attempting to do by finding some way of measuring it over a greater period of time, taking a year average into account rather than a fixed date and time or some other method that takes account of what Ian was describing. On census day, we might be 45 short and three weeks later we could be two plus. That just is not accounted for and there could be some way of solving that problem, but that does not solve the problem of the argument that would come from many local authorities that the pupil-teacher ratios should take account of far wider issues and, to that extent, also arbitrary. There have to be quick supplementaries—one from Gordon and one from Liz. On the teacher number ratio, Ian You said that you were down 45 teachers. I think that North Lanarkshire was down 58 teachers, yet overall between 2014 and 2015 the number of full-time teachers was down three across the whole of Scotland. I want to ask you about workforce planning. We are in a situation in which, since 2011, primary school pupils have increased by 30,000 to the projected figure for 2016. We did see a dip in secondary school pupils, but that is expected to rise because the primary school pupils are coming through. What responsibility have councils got about workforce planning? Glasgow Mirrors, that example, Glasgow had 40 years of pupil decline. In the last five or six years, we have now seen the primary role growing. It has been up 3,000 over the last four years. Over the next decade, it is going to increase by somewhere between 30 and 18 per cent, and that will flow through into secondary schools at the moment that are still dropping. We need more primary school teachers, but less secondary school at the moment. It is a very difficult one, because if you think about how the budget settled, it is a cash grant. There is no recognition of demographic change in my view. Councils have really difficult decisions, because they will have to find me the money for 50 extra teachers next year just to stand still. That is not an improvement in service. That is just to maintain the current class sizes and the current pupil teacher ratios. That is a very difficult circle to square when you are dealing with the type of finances that we are dealing with at the moment. That will be fairly symptomatic across Scotland in terms of the demographics that we are facing at the moment. As well as that, we do have some chronic workforce issues. We struggle to get to nominational teachers. They are sorted as in STEM, in maths, in home economic teachers, or as rare as a hen's tooth. I think that we need to, at this point in time, stop and have a look nationally. I cannot go out and recruit teachers in my local authority, so I think that we need to look at what we are getting in nationally. Even now, I think that the teachers have gone into English and maths as probationary teachers have fallen, so I think that we need to look at that nationally. I do not think that the solution to workforce planning in the future is necessarily local. I think that we need to have a joint up approach to this to make sure that the people that we are getting through our colleges in the universe are what we need. Just on that point and in relation to what Mr Robertson said, the GTC in Scotland has acknowledged that there are problems just as you have identified. What can we do to remove some of the inflexibility in the workforce so that we can actually have more teachers in Scotland in the correct subjects? I think that the question is less about flexibility and more about getting prospective teachers through the system. Workforce planning is actually a difficult thing to do. You have to anticipate what you need several years in advance and it is not easy. I think that no one who is involved in national workforce planning on anything would say that it is perfect. What we are currently working with Government on, as with ADES, is looking at how we can factor in the vacancies that are already within the system earlier on and within the evaluation of workforce planning needs, so that it is based on a needs-based assessment as to what you actually need rather than just an asset of calculation on what is required. Clearly, we will need more teachers through the system, and that is generated by having more flexibility. In other words, the GTC might argue that that is dotting the qualifications of being a teacher. There are arguments that you would have to take on board there, but it is more about how we got the right system in place and are we encouraging people to be teachers and can authorities and recruit them in time for the people teacher census as well. Those are the issues that we need to be looking at rather than flexibility. I think that you are picking up on that point. I welcome the recent announcement that North Sea oil workers could be re-trained as teachers. I think that that is inspired for the simple reason that people who are losing jobs at the moment probably bring with them exactly the kind of skills that we are looking for in schools at the moment. That is the STEM subjects. If that project can bear some fruit, that is very positive and bodes well for being able to recruit to what has been difficult to recruit to POS. I need to be brief. I am looking at the time. I have a few questions about the efforts to tackle the attainment gap. Just whether the members of the panel think that local government and national government's efforts should be targeted in a particular area, whether it should be targeted at a particular stage in a pupil's education or in a particular subject area, whether that be literacy or numeracy or anything more detailed than that in any comments in the panel. No, I do think so Mark. Speaking for myself at least, we are not educational, it is hard to answer that in a detailed way. What I would say is that you really need to look at the whole child and you really need to look at what the needs of that child are. It is about making a professional judgment as to what would help that young person do better or whatever their might be weaker at. That might not necessarily be in one, like a subject area might be more in skills and being able to be ready to be able to learn if they are coming from a chaotic background. If you are asking about where the evidence points to where you get the biggest return for your investment, it has to be within the early years. There are a number of studies that look at the investment that the public sector puts into early education. That has a sustained return not just in terms of attainment but wider outcomes around health and wellbeing. It is really about looking at the whole child and ensuring that professional judgment is brought to bear on what that individual needs. We have had a dialogue with the Scottish Government on what the attainment gap actually is. It is not solely defined and everybody will have a different understanding of what it is and how we fix it, but I agree very much with Robert that the biggest gains can be made by looking very much at the early years. That needs to be where our focus is. We are talking about a child. You cannot remove the child from the circumstances he or she is in. If we are talking about things such as health and wellbeing and the cross-cutting themes of illiteracy and numeracy, if you have a child who has come in from an illiterate background, you have to tackle the family as well. That is to play again that we need to maintain services in there to ensure that our children are benefiting from health and wellbeing from illiteracy and numeracy cross-cutting themes. I just wanted to refer to the OECD report, because it really looked at the situation that was faced by Scotland. It said that there are multiple gaps, so it cannot just focus on attainment and neglect the fact that there is a wider set of outcomes around that individual child that might need to be improved. It would be hard to improve attainment if your situation is that you are not able to access learning in the same way as your peers. It really brings back to the issue of integrated services getting it right for every child. We have talked about that for a reason. Ensuring that the services for that individual child are the right ones to ensure that they can continue to develop as individuals, not just in terms of attainment. The Parliament recently passed the Education Scotland Bill, which sets out challenges for local government, particularly on reducing the attainment gap. Do you think that the targets that local government has been set are possible? Will local government be able to reduce the attainment gap, given the cuts and funding that are coming down the line? Is it feasible to ask local government to deliver that at the same time as in cutting budgets? Again, it comes back to flexibility. It could be done, but I think that local government needs more flexibility if there is to deliver on that. I think that it is possible, but it is challenging, but it would just be a plea for more flexibility in order to deliver that. Possible, but less likely, given the financial circumstances. That would be my answer to it. Everybody is committed to trying to achieve it, but in the circumstance it may prove, certainly within that timescale, far more difficult. I think that that is saying that lots of the actions that we are taking, certainly in early years, will not be the results of that for many years to come. It is a very much a long-term project. It needs to have a joint commitment by all parties across the political divide in terms of the overall aims. As fellow colleagues have said, it is going to be extremely difficult, given the financial circumstances that we are in at this point in time. I am interested in the variation and attainment between schools and local authorities. The local authority benchmarking notes that the average attainment varies between local authorities and schools, and it is not all due to deprivation levels. In fact, deprivation levels seem to account for approximately 35 to 40 per cent of that gap. What I am interested in is that we have this high level of variation between councils. Why are some schools and local authorities making better progress than others? Why is that variation there? I will come back to the fundamentals. It is about the equality of leadership and the equality of what goes on in classrooms, full stop. Our role as local authorities is to ensure that we achieve the high performance, so that those schools that are not performing as well as they should be, by any measure, are challenged to improve or have to be changed. We need to be quite clear. My test is always one as a parent. Would that teacher educate my child if not, they should not be there? I have a very good friend, Wen, who said that if it is not happening in a classroom, then it is not working. That goes back to the quality of our teaching and learning. That is got to be the highest it can be. That is where things such as the GTCS professional update, Higgs 4, all those things are happening. They will come in and they will make a difference. To try and get more equality, there needs to be a challenge in support in each local authority. There needs to be a support that we as education authorities provide to those schools, and obviously education Scotland supports us, but when you look at the number of quality improvement officers that have been employed in our authorities, the Audit Scotland report in 2014 states at that point that they had went down by 22 per cent. The budgets that are available to local authorities are directly affecting the support that we can provide to those schools to try and even out the performance that you have so rightly identified. I hear what you are saying about leadership and the quality of teaching in the classrooms and so on, but to what extent is that being analysed? To what extent are we confident that that is the reason for the balance of the variation? Do we have anything that we would underpin that? Or is it just anecdotal? Ian? Obviously, when you look at raw league tables and here at the bottom, you look at all the other ways to present data to make you look better. If you look at things called like average tariff scores and things like that, and if you look at some of what you perceive at face value to be very high performing schools in quite affluent areas, if you start looking at tariff scores and you look at schools in less affluent areas, it does that. See that phrase that is used all the time about what added value are you offering? Sometimes, even if that is just data to have a very good conversation with a head teacher, they say that you appear to be performing well but you appear not to be performing as well as you could or should be relative to the demographic that you are working with. We have to use different measures and just to have a conversation and then challenge somebody to say that you look like you are doing very well but you could be doing better. Absolutely. Insight is a tool in which we all use now. It is providing much, much richer data than we have ever had before that allows us to get behind that raw, blunt instrument of exam result success. Coming back to this variation, there does not seem to be a pattern here looking at it from the outside. You have councils with high levels of overall deprivation performing above average. You have councils with low levels of deprivation where pupils from deprived backgrounds are performing above average. It is not really giving us any data to work on. There is no consistency. Some of this comes back to the Sims data that bases all of this. Speaking of someone that comes from a rural authority, I find Sims data is worse than useless in terms of determining poverty. It is fine, maybe not in Ian's case in Glasgow, where you can identify a large area that suffers from deprivation but in rural areas some of the poorest and most deprived people stay next door to some of the wealthiest. It is absolutely impossible in rural areas to use Sims data to identify areas of deprivation. I think that there is something around getting the right data in the first place. Is not that the point that Colin just made? We have pupils who are in areas of relatively well-off, least deprived areas, but they themselves are, we have fallen to the most deprived category, but they are doing better than average. They are doing better than pupils like themselves in other authorities. Why is that? For factors that have already been described, clearly Glasgow is large enough to have a fair spread of attainment between the various schools, whether that is primary or secondary within the city itself. Looking at raw statistical analysis is not enough. For example, in Govan Hill we have a hugely significant Roma community, which has a knock-on effect in terms of both the costs and the process of delivering education within two or three local primary schools, but those figures never come in to Sims. They are just not there, they are not taken account of, and what you need to know are additional things. It is not only in education that that happens. Until recently, I had responsibility for social work in Glasgow City Council. If you look at all sorts of comparators, as we always do between local authorities, for example, the number of elderly people in residential care, Glasgow is very high, as is, I think, Shetland. If you look at it, there is no direct connection with poverty. There are other issues going on, and they are not always easily determined. If I could just come back, is there a definition of poverty? Work that Highlands and Islands Enterprise recently did through the minimum income standard that looked at basic cost to live in across the Highlands and Islands suggested that, for example, the island at Unst in Shetland, the basic cost to live in could be 40 per cent higher than it was in the central belt of Scotland. If you factor that in, somebody that the thresholds for benefits are the same in Shetland as they are in Glasgow, the levels of benefits are the same in Shetland as they are in Glasgow, then you can see why this huge amount of disparity starts to come, because somebody that needs 40 per cent more in Balthasyn to maintain the same standard of living is going to be deprived actually before the person in Glasgow, but they are not going to be picked up because they are in an island that barely has 250 people. I think possibly the frustration here is that clearly there are some councils that are getting it right on average within their area, but we do not have enough data to be able to understand, to be able to transfer that success to other areas is just not there. I think that that is an honest—if we are responding honestly to say that, I think that that is indeed the case. I suppose that what we would say is that I do not think that just from knowing the people, there is nobody in a local authority who is not working their hardest to actually get a result. The part of the reason that you have this information put into the public domain is to beg the questions that you are asking. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. Clearly, something like the national improvement framework, even though we have been reasonably sceptical about some elements of that, when that is brought to be, it will provide more information about how councils are able to tackle the issues that we are discussing. That is all fine, but clearly then we need to decide what we are going to be doing with that. As we have talked about before, the capacity within councils has to be there to be able to tackle those issues. That is an issue that we always need to pick up as well, because we also look at the issue of variation between councils, but what they are saying is that you need that capacity at the middle level within the system to be able to tackle the issue and have the ability to look at the things that you need to look at and invest the time and effort to do that. There is not a simple solution to that, but partly for having that sort of information is to allow the questions to be asked and then the policy to develop to be able to tackle that. I am not sure that I agreed with Colin that we have quite a lot of data on that, but I am down to the individual level. Ian, do you want to come in? The insight tool is a bit rusty here in terms of my last time of it, but right across Scotland, each secondary school, for example, will be linked with five comparator schools based on its socio-economic circumstances, and what you will be comparing there, relatively speaking, will be how you are performing relative to similar characteristic schools across the country. From recollection, it was about four or five years linked with, and those head teachers were actually quite working co-operative to understand why your physics results are so good compared to things like that, so they were getting into really granular conversations around what was making an impact, and it keeps coming back to the quality of what is going on in a classroom. Sometimes it is about teaching methodologies, et cetera, et cetera, but the bottom line is that it is about the quality of that. It is about how we use that data, and it is about the difficulty of aggregating that up. At a very localised level, I think that schools and head teachers are far more aware of how they are performing relative to their peers and not necessarily within their geography. It could be somebody in Aberdeenshire that you are being compared with, and I think that that is good and healthy. I think that that is the point that I was trying to get to effectively, that I think that we have got some of that stuff, and it is not to criticise, because I think that everybody is working hard, and I think that Robert made a very good point there, but there is still this variation. We need to recognise it and we need to work to try and understand it and hopefully eliminate it, and I think that that is a good point to end on. Just because of time, but I know that there is enough a lot more that we could have got through this morning, but just times against us. I thank you once again for coming along this morning and giving your time to the committee, and I suspend briefly. Our next item is to take evidence on the school spending and the educational attainment gap from the Scottish Government. I welcome Angela Constance, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, and our supporting officials. As soon as the cabinet secretary is ready, you are okay. Can I invite the cabinet secretary to make some opening remarks? Thank you, convener, and good morning to committee. I very much welcome this opportunity to join committee again to discuss our on-going work, the on-going work of this Government to address the attainment gap in our schools. This Government has been absolutely clear about the priority that we place on education, it is at the heart of our programme for government, but our commitment to drive up attainment in all schools and close the attainment gap to ensure that children in all parts of Scotland, whether in our least or most affluent areas, have a fair chance to succeed. We are working very closely with all our key delivery partners to raise standards everywhere and to raise them most quickly in the areas where it is most needed. That is why we have established the attainment Scotland fund, providing £100 million of targeted support to schools and local authorities in the most deprived areas. That is in addition to the package of universal support in place to support schools and authorities across the country, including the recruitment of attainment advisors to work with schools and raising attainment for all programmes that have encouraged more than 200 schools across the country to try out and share ideas. This is a significant programme of work that is underpinned by the national improvement framework for Scottish education, which will provide clear and consistent information for parents, teachers and, of course, local and national government about performance in education, both the progress of individual young people and the performance of the system as a whole. The changes that we are making, convener, through our investment, are having an impact and we are making good progress. The OECD study of Scottish education published just before Christmas concluded that academic achievement in schools is above international average. That attainment is improving, that Scotland's schools are inclusive and that our young people have positive attitudes towards school. As we know, young people in Scotland gained a record number of passes at higher and advanced higher last summer. School leaver destinations are now the best on record. It is worth noting that much of our funding for education is, of course, directed through our funding package for local government. Within the local government settlement education is a priority. We remain committed to teacher numbers and the settlement includes provision of £88 million specifically to support delivery of the commitment to maintain the pupil teacher ratio and provide a place on the teacher induction scheme to every probationary teacher who needs one. Teacher quality is the most important in-school factor in a child's attainment and I do not believe that cutting the number of teachers will improve attainment or close the equity gap. We are investing in our schools. We have rebuilt or refurbished 607 schools. As a result of that, the number of pupils in poor or bad conditioned schools has more than halved since 2007. We are continuing our major investment in Scotland's school estate through the £1.8 billion Scotland schools for the future programme. We are national and local government will work in partnership to deliver more than 100 new or refurbished schools, which is expected to benefit 15,000 pupils. Closing the attainment gap is a fundamental part to the on-going work to improve Scottish education to ensure excellence and equity right across Scotland. That is why we will continue to invest in our schools, our teachers and, most importantly, in our children and young people. We had representatives of local authorities in just before. It is interesting that you say that you do not believe that cutting teacher numbers would help to bridge the attainment gap. One of the things that local authorities kept saying is that they felt that they were losing a bit of flexibility. Teachers numbers were regarded as part of the problem that they had with their flexibility. What would your counterargument be to that? Were teachers numbers and some of the other Government's tasks making it more difficult for them to be as flexible? I think that we all recognise and I would hope that our partners in local government would recognise that too. I know that members right across the parliamentary chamber recognise that one of the most important factors in raising attainment is the quality of teaching. That is why, as a Government, we have invested heavily into leadership and the quality of teaching in Scotland. To put it quite simply, I fail to see how reducing the number of high-quality teachers in our schools would help us at this time when we are galvanising our efforts—the length and breadth of Scotland—to tackle the attainment gap and to address the issue of equity. Good quality teachers are imperative and I fail to see how reducing the number of good quality teachers in our education system would be to the benefit of anyone. Thank you, cabinet secretary. One of the interesting points was when I asked them where was the innovation, where were the new ideas in local government for education delivery. They actually became very positive at that point and they started talking about some of the work that they currently do within their own authorities. However, the thing that kept coming out and coming across was that there tends to be exam time covering of the paper. It is my ball. There does not need to be that kind of sharing of that good practice and some of those good schemes. One of the individuals from Glasgow said that sometimes you do hold on to good stuff that was working well in your area because you want to be the innovator, but surely local authorities at this time, in those challenging times, should be sharing those ideas to make things better so that we can deliver across Scotland? It is absolutely clear that collaboration has to be front and centre of curriculum for excellence. Collaboration has to be at the heart of our efforts to close the attainment gap. It is certainly at the heart of our thinking in terms of how we are progressing with the Scottish attainment challenge because the work that we are doing there and the learning that we will gain from that work through the efforts of Education Scotland and the National Improvement Hub, we will want to spread that knowledge and that learning that we gained from the attainment challenge. However, it is clear to me—I visit schools regularly—that we have good schools and they are doing great things. In that regard, our colleagues and local government are absolutely correct. Although we have more collaboration between schools and clusters, peer-to-peer collaboration than we have ever had before, it is clear that we need to continue on that vein. Much of our attraction to the London challenge, for example, was the ownership that you were not just responsible for the children in front of you. Collectively, everyone in the system, including teachers, had a responsibility to raise attainment across London. We are watching everyone in Scotland, whether they are a classroom teacher or someone else in the education system, trying to galvanise efforts so that we share good practice and that we are driving improvement across Scotland and that we all have a responsibility to do that. I look into the future, cabinet secretary. Obviously it goes to close the attainment gap. What measures would the Scottish Government and Education Scotland have if local authorities in the future persist to have the gap and others are doing well? Would it be a case of Education Scotland trying to find other local authorities to who are exemplar and to try to work something out? How would we deal with that situation in the future? It is important that, as a Government, organisations such as Education Scotland are pulling together with our partners and local government, that we work together in our common challenges to overcome the barriers and obstacles. In terms of specific measures, the duties that both Scottish ministers and local authorities have in terms of annual reporting as to how we are overcoming the equity gap, which means that we all have duties as a result of Education Scotland Act, duties and inequalities of outcome duties. Part of the reporting responsibilities, as I said, both in Scottish ministers and on councils, will aid with accountability, transparency and the onus will be on local and national government to report, not just in a way that is describing what they are doing but evaluating what they are doing and explaining what works and identifying the future challenges. That is important. I think that our approach to the attainment Scotland fund has been quite different from other initiatives. We have not just calculated a share of funds to go to a particular school or a particular local authority. The funding is very much tied in with bespoke improvement plans that are evidence-led. We will have opportunities in implementing the recommendations from the OECD report to be doing that in partnership with local government, in terms of how we move forward with the national improvement framework. Again, we will be doing that with local government. There are lots of opportunities for mutual support, as opposed to mutual challenge as well, and shining a light on what is working and where we need to redouble our efforts. You started there describing the essential importance of the quality of teaching, and that reflects what we had from the first panel this morning in the leadership. You then effortlessly went into describing the need to maintain the quantity of teachers. The conflating of those two things is rather disingenuous. The point that we were hearing this morning was that, for example, the establishment of the pupil-teacher ratio has struck many in local government as arbitrary, not backed necessarily by any evidence. The arbitrary nature of that, linked to the arbitrary nature of appointing times, senses calculations to whether or not they hit their teacher targets, is causing real problems. As George said, a lack of flexibility, which in difficult times is proving even more problematic. I am putting more stress on, for example, classroom assistance, distance support for learning assistance and the others who provide vital support in the quality of teaching, which, as you rightly say, is important. I think that there is a concern that the issue of quality and quantity is being merged when very distinct propositions are in tight budget circumstances. That lack of flexibility means that, yes, quality needs to be maintained, but there are questions about the arbitrary quantum that the Government has arrived at. I think that they are related to quantity and quality. I understand the theoretical point that Mr MacArthur is trying to make to tease out and to explore matters fully, but I do think that, ultimately, they are related. Given that we all agree that leadership, all levels of education, leadership and classroom teachers, the quality of teaching and quality professionals is a linchpin, and it is the biggest factor in terms of a child's in-school experience. I fail to see how standing back and allowing those numbers to reduce to fall would help us in our collective efforts. The blended learning that teachers are by the road and mission is reliant on classroom assistance and the wider support structure that they get within a school. The quality of the learning and the teaching is not dependent on the number of teachers alone. Presumably, once you get beyond a certain point, the whole thing becomes unmanageable, but the quantity that has been arrived at in terms of pupil-teacher ratios to local authorities seems arbitrary and does not allow them to reflect local circumstances in particular areas or in particular schools. At this current time, it would be a far better proposition to allow that greater flexibility to focus on the quality of teaching and the learning experience rather than on arbitrary numbers of teachers or pupil-teacher ratios. I was coming to your point about pupil-teacher ratios, but the point that I wanted to make before I did that, Mr MacArthur, was that, as a Government, we have a lead responsibility in workforce planning in ensuring that we have enough teachers in the system, and we work closely with our partners in their attempts to ensure that we have the right number of teachers in the right places. I am very resistant to the notion that the quantity of teachers is separate from the issue of quality. In terms of pupil-teacher ratio, we have reached an agreement with local government to have a national agreement on the pupil-teacher ratio this year. That is preferable for a whole host of reasons, as opposed to having individual agreements with local authorities where that will indeed limit the flexibility that local authorities have. The point about census is that there has to be a way of counting teachers in the system. The school census day, I appreciate it, is a day in September. Every year is how we have done it since 2003. If people want to come forward with other suggestions and other alternatives about how we count the number of teachers at any given time in our system, we are always open to that. I think that the idea was put forward by the gentleman from Glasgow City Council that moving away from a single point in time census day and looking at the picture of the course of over a school year or even over a school term may provide less of an arbitrary picture where he was saying that there were 45 teachers short on census day, but over the course of that term they were probably at their numbers, and nevertheless they were fining £900,000, which against the backdrop of cuts that are already being borne by education services and local authorities, is the last thing that they need and is unlikely to allow them to deliver across a range of different services in education and children services. It just seems to me that we have arrived at a situation where, even in terms of achieving the Government's objective, it is a very blunt instrument that is being used to determine whether it is successful. I think that it is widely recognised that pupil-teacher ratio is a meaningful measurement. In terms of your point about an alternative to a census gathering exercise, you describe something that, in first hearing to me, sounds quite unwieldy. I am not convinced that local Government information systems could cope with what you have described in terms of having a system that is almost counted by the number of professionals in the system at various points in time over a term. I would not be confident about that at all. The evidence base was that it made you decide that the pupil-teacher ratio was the best way of making an agreement with councils to deliver better quality of input. The pupil-teacher ratio is based on where we are at just now. We have arrived at that position for a whole host of historical reasons. We know that the work of McKinsey in 2007 very much focuses on the importance of quality of teaching. We know that we have quality teachers in our system. We have invested heavily in that in terms of initial teacher education, in terms of probationary years and the support that probationary teachers get in terms of the registration process and, thereafter, the professional update. If we do not protect pupil-teacher ratio nationally, what does that mean for our system? That would mean that we would be liable to reducing the number of high-quality teachers in our system. That cannot be a good thing, and there is no evidence to show that that would be… Just to clarify, it is the McKinsey evidence that makes you believe that the evidence is there for supporting your review. It is informed my thinking. Although I am not saying that the McKinsey evidence gives you a specific answer that the pupil-teacher ratio should be 14 to 1 across Scotland, but in terms of the importance of having quality teachers in our system, it is certainly solid evidence. If we do not protect the pupil-teacher ratio as it is, if we allow the pupil-teacher ratio to increase, that will be as a result of a falling number of quality teachers in our system, and that cannot be a good thing. I apologise that I will have to leave at 10 past 12. Cabinet Secretary, last week I had a pleasure of a long conversation with someone who is at the coalface in education, and that was my 7-year-old granddaughter. We talked about the roles that she goes through and the testing that she goes through to determine how well she is achieving. We had written to the Scottish Government, noting that attainment tends to be measured in terms of examination results. I had that conversation with her and how it impacts the various members of the class. If you are doing well, that is fine. If you are not doing well, it causes some problems for those who are not doing well. The other thing that we talked about was that, while it is comparatively straightforward to compare the performance of different groups of pupils in tests or examinations on a national basis, we still have some question as to how we measure achievement. I wonder how pupils, parents and education stakeholders will know for certain when the attainment gap has been closed, and whether closing the attainment gap also means closing the achievement gap and if so whether there is an agreed measure or definition of the achievement gap? Seven-year-olds are always instructive. I have regular representations from my eight-year-old about what he would like to see changed in education in Scotland. All of his requests have been refused, I hasten to add. It is an important point. We have always been clear as a Government that attainment is something beyond exam results or school leaver destinations. I know that, in terms of various academics, I know in terms of the OECD report, which quite helpfully laid out the theoretical difference between attainment and wider achievement. Achievement is about the experiences that young people get and the knowledge and skills that they acquire. Traditionally, attainment has been very much focused on exam results. In terms of our work, I suppose that there are different things, but they are inextricably linked as well in that you improve the attainment of children if you are also supporting their social and emotional wellbeing and considering their needs in the broadest term. I would like to point committee to the interim framework report that was published just before Christmas. There is a range of information there from the grown-up Scotland survey, SSLN, school leaver destinations exams and PISA. It also has a range of information about health and wellbeing. As we move forward, there is the Scottish standardised assessment that will be introduced, but we are working very closely with our partners to get the right measurements. A lot of stakeholders have been very excited and interested in the work that we wish to pursue around a dashboard. On the one hand, we do not want to have too few measurements because we will then have teaching to targets, but neither do we want an unwieldy and complex system of measurement. We have the challenge from OECD that said that we have to identify the right metrics that reflect the breadth of our curriculum. In that work that we are progressing over the next year or so, we will identify the meaningful milestones that will signpost the way to closing the attainment gap so that we come to the point when we know that we have closed the attainment gap. That is inextricably linked to addressing issues in and around achievement in that broader experience. It is helpful, but it comes back to the issue of being able to measure the attainment gap, which tends to be standardised assessment, which is transmogrified into the tests that depend on the emotional circumstances of those at the coalface, i.e. the children who are going through the education experience. As I said, it is very helpful that we will have a dashboard of criteria of attainment. I am still not sure, and I am glad that we are not talking about targets anymore, how do we measure the achievement gap? That is a sort of esoteric question. I am happy to leave it and then perhaps have further discussions later. I am still not sure whether closing the attainment gap means closing the achievement gap and how do we measure that? No, it is not a esoteric question. I just have to be clear that we are not measuring the attainment gap in terms of assessment or testing. The standardised assessment is part of a broad range of information that will be gathered and used to evaluate performance. What will be published is curriculum for excellence levels. The proportion of children at P1, P4, P7 and P3 that meet the relevant curriculum for excellence level is one measurement. In terms of your broader question about how do we know when we have closed the equity gap, what we have been clear about is that we are using the SIMD index, and we have opted for that. I know that there has been discussion that not everybody is completely in favour of that measurement. I know that some people have concerns about how it picks up rural poverty. We have opted to use the SIMD as a methodology because it captures a range of incomes, and we are not just looking at a binary definition of children who are advantaged or disadvantaged. We can look at the 10 per cent most disadvantaged and compare with the 10 per cent least disadvantaged or the 20 per cent least and most disadvantaged, and we can also see what is happening to children in the middle-income desiles as well. It is fair to say that there are many different gaps, and through the education bill that we have recently unanimously endorsed, the primary focus is on socioeconomic disadvantage, which is the importance of the Scottish index of multiple deprivation. However, there are other gaps that exist, and I am on record that there is a willingness through regulation to extend our measures and our duties to other gaps. We have the gender gap, although girls outperform boys. If you look at additional support needs, looked after children, there are other gaps. There is a willingness to extend as time goes by, but we really need to galvanise those efforts in looking at the poverty-related gap. We have talked again about closing the attainment gap, and I share a lot of chicks' confusion about what it is that we are talking about. Clearly, there are multiple gaps. The OECD policy review says that there is not one gap, but many of the language of the gap may misleadingly suggest that it is self-evident that which gap should be the main target, or that one gap may stand as an adequate proxy for many others. Given that the Government has committed itself to closing the gap completely, do you not think that there are risks there that gauging the success of that is going to be nigh on impossible? We are not even accepting in the commitment that has been made the existence of those multiple gaps. I think that we are accepting that there are various gaps that are interlinked and related often, but the national improvement framework has made clear what our priorities are. Given the impact and size of the poverty-related gap, we are quite right in terms of that being the starting point and focus of the national improvement framework in the first instance. We have already given an indication that we will quickly want to be looking at what more we can do around the gap, the educational gap and look after children. It is important to get the building blocks absolutely right and then to refine and to add to the framework. In the sense that we have started from the position of oversimplifying the problem that we are trying to deal with. That does not seem to me a sensible way of going about addressing what is by everybody's acknowledgement, the most complex of issues that are affected by multiple factors, some of which you have acknowledged. However, the Government is committed to closing the attainment gap completely and will be measured on its success in doing that. I think that, as a committee, certainly from my perspective, I have no idea what the measurements along the way to achieving that commitment are. In terms of the priorities that are laid out in the national improvement framework, there is a particular focus on literacy and numeracy. As part of curriculum for excellence, literacy and numeracy has been bedded in every part of the curriculum. They are not taught in silos. We have been very clear that when we talk about closing the gap, we are talking about closing the gap between the children from the least and most disadvantage. That is ambitious. That is harder than a more binary calculation of looking at children that are disadvantaged or not. We have set ourselves a high bar. As indicated to Mr Brody, there is a real focus on improving children's health and wellbeing, employability skills and sustaining positive school leaver destinations. I go back to the point with regard to SIND. We are not comparing the 50 per cent most disadvantaged to the 50 per cent least disadvantaged. The advantage of SIND is that it has 10 deciles. We are looking at the least disadvantaged compared with the most disadvantaged. We will know that the gap is closed when there is no gap between the least and the most disadvantaged. That presupposes the SIND to pick up those who are living in absolute poverty and who are most profoundly affected by poverty. The evidence that we heard this morning from Gary Robinson, the Shetland Islands Council is that the SIND does not pick up particularly rural poverty. He cited the example of Unst, where the cost of living is estimated to be around 40 per cent higher than the national average. When you consider that benefits are the same across the UK, where income is measured and high SMID is calculated, does not factor in that additional cost of living? Does anyone living in poverty, such as Walter Sound, simply not going to be picked up on them? I contend that SIND is not perfect. I do not think that any single measurement is perfect. That is the whole purpose of the national improvement framework that is broad. I think that it is the best that is available just now. I would never argue that any single measurement is perfect. For example, using SIND is preferable to looking at free school meal entitlement, given that free school meal entitlement is universal in primary 1, 2 and 3. On that point, on to a single metric, which is again one of the concerns that we have heard from witnesses. If you oversimplify the problem, the risk is that you apply metrics that are going to be blunt. They are going to miss out, and the SMID 20 is a classic example. It will underplay the existence and the severity of rural poverty. That is why, as I alluded to earlier, we are taking on the recommendations from the OECD report that says that we have to develop the right metrics that reflect the curriculum and measure accurately and proportionately the outcomes that we are trying to achieve in the curriculum. I appreciate the discussion and the debate around SIND, but the national improvement framework, in terms of the range of information that is used to evidence the size of the current equity gap, is broad range. I quoted earlier the growing up in Scotland report, I quoted earlier the SSLN report and looking at that in terms of SIND. There was also other evidence used in terms of PIPs, as well as the traditional exam results and PISA results. We have started from a broad basket of measurements. I accept that, in terms of growing up in Scotland, when you analyse school leaver destinations, we are often looking at that through the prism of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. I would contend that, while it is not a perfect measurement, it is the best one that we have. Cabinet Secretary, I am sure that you are aware of Labour's pure start fund, where every primary school in the country receives an extra £1,000 for each pupil from a deprived background. My own authority, for example, on the Lancer, would receive an additional £5 million from that fund. I am sure that you are also aware that the Scottish Government's attainment chance for 1,500 schools gets no support whatsoever to close that gap between the richest and the rest. Do you, Cabinet Secretary, think that it is right that a pupil from a deprived background is missing out on support to improve their life chances because of where they live? No. We have, Mr Pentland, embarked upon a journey where we are picking up the pace, where we are determined to ensure that the children most in need get access to the resources that they need. Through the attainment challenge, that is not the only way of funding. There are other streams of funding, but through the attainment challenge, the first step of the attainment challenge was to target seven local authorities from the smallest and clack manager to the largest in Glasgow, North Lanarkshire, as part of the attainment challenge. Those seven local authorities collectively have more than half of Scotland's poorest children. In recognition that there are children from poor backgrounds in every school, in every part of Scotland, the next phase was the more specific schools part of the attainment challenge, which was focused on schools who had 70 per cent of their children in SIMD desiles 1 and 2. The attainment challenge now covers 21 local authorities at 300 plus schools. We have an OECD recommendation that is saying that we should look at extending the attainment challenge to secondary schools, and we are indeed doing that. However, there are other aspects of our funding, such as the innovation fund and the access to education fund. We have a strong universal offer, and where we have to focus our efforts is to ensure that, in terms of building on that strong universal offer, we target in the right way and in the most effective way, and the approach that we have taken is to target local authorities and to target schools. Do you not then think, cabinet secretary, that you are being unfair to those schools who are not eligible for any kind of support whatsoever? How are you going to then maintain the attainment gap? Why are those schools having to wait? You say that you have a universal approach to that. If you have a universal approach to that, why are not all those schools included just now? All schools are included in the universal approach. I mean that we have funded attainment advisers, for example, to work with every local authority. There is the national improvement hub, which has been set up by Education Scotland to ensure that best practice. They are learning from the Scottish attainment challenge, because they will be learning from the attainment challenge that is absolutely crucial in setting the pace as we move forward. What I am questioning, Mr Pentland, is not your sincerity in ensuring that the most vulnerable children receive the support that they need, but I am, with respect, querying proposals that are set out by Scottish Labour in terms of their effectiveness? When you have said, cabinet secretary, that there are deprived children in each school, obviously you are associated with that as these people need to help, these kids need to help, the schools need to help to close the attainment gap. My question to you is, when do you foresee that that opportunity for these schools, who are not part of everything that you have just said there, when will they receive the financial help to assist them to close the attainment gap? We have a very strong offer to all schools. We have prioritised funding to ensure that we continue to invest in the teaching workforce that we are continuing to protect teacher numbers, because that is important to all children and particularly so children who are also living with disadvantaged. As I said, we have funded attainment advisers, the national improvement hub, the raising attainment for all programme with more than 200 schools participating. Some of that is about what we do with our resource, some of that is about what we do in terms of delivering that universal service. We know that attainment over the past decade has increased. We know that there is already evidence of closing the attainment gap. There is a body of evidence and measurements that indicate that we are on the right road, whether it is with school leaver destinations at a record high. We know that the gap in school leaver destinations is closing. We know in terms of young people from the most disadvantaged communities, that it is improving. It used to be two out of ten young people. That is now nearly four out of ten young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. We are achieving one plus higher. However, we are absolutely determined to increase that pace. The overarching framework is indeed the national improvement framework that gives us that line of sight from what is happening in a classroom to the evaluation of policies and approaches at a local and national level with the obligation on Scottish ministers and local government to report and to be accountable for the effectiveness of their actions. Would you therefore concede to the cabinet secretary that Scottish Labour's fair start fund would close attainment gap quicker than the Scottish Government's attainment challenge fund? No, I do not, Mr Pentland, because I remain yet to be convinced about how you would fund it if you were ever in the position to implement it. At that point, we will have to disagree. We have already advised how we fund it. The election is soon, I know, guys, but let us try and stick to the support this morning, Mark. Thank you, convener. Cabinet Secretary, you said in your opening remarks that cutting teachers will not cut the equity or attainment gap. Similarly, I would say that cutting education budgets will not cut the equity or attainment gap. I am concerned by the comments by our earlier panel that local government feels that the Scottish Government is making it more difficult to close the attainment gap. It said that the budget cuts, the Scottish Government is handing down to them, is making their job more difficult to cut the attainment or equity gap. Do you not see it as a strange position where the Government's overriding priority from you and the First Minister to cut that attainment gap when the people that you are asking to deliver that priority say that you are making their job harder? Of course, most local authorities are still to actually set their budget. I think that it is fair to say that for everyone, whether it is the Scottish Government or any one of the 32 local authorities that public finances are challenging, they remain challenging, they have been challenging for some years. Much of the funding for education, as I said in my opening remarks, is channeled through the local government settlement, which I would contend is a fair settlement. We would acknowledge that it is not without its challenges, but in reality every local authority has accepted the budget settlement, and the reduction is of less than 1 per cent once you include other resources in terms of investment into integration of health and social care. The reality is that, despite the challenging financial times that we have all faced at a local and national level, attainment has increased and the gap has closed. The challenge for us all is to regalvanise our efforts to pick up the pace and to recognise that we are still investing—or what is invested at a local level—is nearly £5 billion in education. You do not agree with the comments from the previous panel from local government that the Scottish Government is making it harder for them to reduce the attainment gap? No, I do not agree with that at all, Mr Griffin. I have hoped that I have outlined this morning that there is a range of activity and a range of efforts and a real willingness on the part of this Government to work in partnership with everyone at every level in education in Scotland to overcome the barriers and the interests of all children. The financial realities are challenging for local and national Government, but the reality is that we both have a job of work to do and we need to crack on with it. Although we all recognise the financial constraints, we need to focus on what we can do with the resources that we have. I go back to my earlier point, convener, that, despite the challenging financial times that we have all lived through, attainment is increasing and the gap is closing, and we need to continue on that vein. You have spoken about the financial situation that we find ourselves in, but some of your cabinet colleagues have been successful in getting protection for particular areas of their budget—I think particularly about policing—and the NHS. Have you pressed the cabinet secretary for protection for the skills budget? I am probably the bane of the finance minister's life, as I have always been in every capacity that I have ever served this Government in. I am very proud of this Government's record. In terms of my portfolio, there will be an investment of £2.9 billion that will continue our endeavours in the early years and endeavours to close the gap, and the work that we are doing in colleges and in higher education. I think that there is a good budget settlement for education in terms of my portfolio, in terms of Scottish Government spend, and, as I said earlier, it has to be recognised that much of the funding for education is channeled through the local government settlement. Would you not prefer to see the skills budget that you are responsible for protected? In a similar basis, have the other cabinet secretaries been able to secure for their budgets? I have just been challenged earlier by members who are picking up reiterating some of the arguments from COSLA objecting to the measures that we have taken to protect the pupil-teacher ratio and the investment. Are you suggesting that we ring-fen other aspects of the education budget? I am suggesting that other cabinet secretaries have protected spending in their areas. That will mean that non-protected spending over the next five years will be reduced by 16 per cent. If you apply that to local government and education budgets, that is looking at an £800 million cut over the next five years to education budgets. Are you not concerned by that, and would you not seek protection for the schools budget in your portfolio, as other cabinet secretaries have successfully done in their areas? I mean, I would query your figures, Mr Griffin, because we have only set a one-year budget, and I think that any projection into future years is a complete work of fiction in terms of my portfolio and the education and lifelong learning budget. In terms of the resources that go out the door on services and work, on improving services and outcomes, there has been a modest increase and, given the financial challenges, I think that a modest increase of around 1 per cent is to be welcomed. We are in a situation in which we are in a difficult financial situation, but looking at the spice briefing, it says that, in 1999, when devolution started, the local government share of total Scottish Government budget was 36.2 per cent. In 2007-08, it was 35.9 per cent, and in 2015-16, it was 36 per cent. That seems to me fairly consistent and, therefore, there is some level of protection. I would contend, Mr MacDonald, that, as a Government, we have always been fair to local government. We know that spending by councils on education is set to increase by 3.3 per cent. We know that, in terms of total revenue spend on schools since 2006-07, that has went up by at least £208 million. I will go back to one of my original points, convener. Yes, we are all living in financial difficult times. Nonetheless, attainment is improving and we are closing the gap. The Scottish Government's response to the committee's draft budget report states that there is a large number of Government initiatives under way to close the attainment gap or to improve the attainment overall. The response actually describes 13 separate initiatives, some of which are on a universal basis, some of which are on an area basis, and that is on top of any local initiatives. Some participants in the informal discussion that we had seemed to indicate that there was perhaps a difficulty in having a joined-up policy with so many diverse elements. Given the wide range of attainment initiatives and their geographical coverage, how will we evaluate success and achievement in terms of the attainment gap? It is imperative that everything hangs together strategically and that we are ensuring that all the arrows are flying in the direction. The overarching vision and the overarching approach is set out through the national improvement framework for Scotland. That is the vision of both equity and excellence. The framework sets out the six proven drivers for improvement in terms of assessing pupils' progress, parental engagement involvement, leadership professional standards and school improvement. All of that has to fit in with the objectives of curriculum for excellence. The national improvement framework has the national improvement hub and attainment advisers, which is about working specifically with local authorities and ensuring that we are sharing the research that is available and that research has been able to be implemented in practice. Yes, thereafter, we have targeted work through the attainment challenge. As I said, it is imperative that the learning and the evaluation from the attainment challenge actually benefits all schools. The role of the improvement hub and attainment advisers are important in terms of the reason for all programme, the early years collaborative and the schools improvement programme. It is crucial that the case studies, the exemplars of good practice are collected and evaluated and are used to contribute to systems wide improvements. I am quite confident that they are all hangs together sensibly, logically and strategically. Evaluation is a very important part of the attainment challenge. Raising attainment for all programme, for example, is subject to continuous evaluation. That is a whole thing about improvement methodology and the plan-do-study act. It is integral part of our approach to education. Of course, Scotland is a world leader in self-evaluation. In terms of the evaluation, presumably part of that would be to identify successful or effective interventions, is there going to be a process whereby that good example can then be rolled out across the country? For example, in terms of the attainment challenge, there is a four-year evaluation strategy. It also has academic input into that from the Robert Owens Centre in terms of Professor Chapman. While the attainment challenge is very focused on the local authorities and schools in the highest areas of deprivation, there will be very important learning and practices that will indeed have to be rolled out across the country. As part of the evaluation process, are existing policies being evaluated to ensure that they are contributing to our raising attainment and I am thinking of the pupil-teacher ratio, class sizes and so on? Part of our duties and responsibilities in terms of the annual reporting that we will have to do in terms of meeting our inequalities of outcomes duties and the annual reporting to show that we are meeting the strategic objectives of the national improvement framework is very much about that. We do not want annual reporting, whether it is from local or national government, that simply lists what you do. It has to be evaluating impact and outcome. Where impact and outcome are unknown, we have to find the means of establishing that. I am curious, cabinet secretary, about one thing. We are going to measure very closely those programmes that you have mentioned in great detail. If you find a programme that is effective at raising attainment but not effective at closing the attainment gap, what would happen to that programme? Would that programme be discontinued or would you roll that out? We have always been clear that we are not going to close the attainment gap by holding down standards, because that would be the wrong thing to do. Our curriculum for excellence is about children as individuals. However, we need to focus on areas of improvement where we need to improve faster. We have a twin-track approach, if you like. There may well be some bespoke examples, but there will be very few initiatives that will do one thing in isolation. Our focus on target resources and additional initiatives is to address the equity gap where we want to make faster progress. However, I do not see us throwing out good examples or initiatives that raise attainment that do not specifically address the equity gap. We should, if something was making a problem worse, clearly want to be doing that. It is a hypothetical question. I was curious. Thank you very much, cabinet secretary. I thank you and your officials for coming along this morning. There are other areas that we do not have time to get into, not necessarily with the attainment stuff, but with funding council and student support. What we will do is write to you if you do not mind about that. Obviously, we would have appreciated given the timescale between now and dissolution if you could respond before dissolution. Thank you very much. I close the meeting.