 We will continue our inquiry into baseline health protection measures and today we will be focusing on schools. I would like to welcome to the meeting Gary Greenhorn, co-chair of AID's resources network, which is association of directors of education in Scotland, Larry Flanagan, General Secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland, Margaret Wilson, chair of the National Parent Forum Scotland, and Jim Thulless, general secretary of school leaders Scotland. Thank you for giving us your time this morning. This evidence session forms part of our short inquiry into baseline health protection measures. These measures are the main tools that we are using to respond to Covid-19, which include ventilation, face coverings, social distancing and vaccinations. This is a final evidence session that we have planned on baseline health protection measures. The committee will be leading a debate next week, next Thursday, and we plan to highlight the evidence that we have heard in this inquiry to the whole Parliament. The committee will also provide a copy of the written transcript of today's evidence session to the Health, Social Care and Sports Committee to inform its inquiry into the health and wellbeing of children and young people. We therefore value your contribution to the inquiry and for giving us your time this morning. Each member will have approximately 12 minutes each to speak to the panel and ask their questions. We are tight for time this morning and have a number of witnesses, so please ask that you keep your responses as brief as possible and do not feel that you have to answer every single question. I apologise in advance, however, if time runs on too much, I may have to interrupt members or witnesses in the interests of brevity. I will now turn to questions, and if I may be given by asking first question. First, I would like to thank the members of the Scottish Youth Parliament who provided very insightful evidence on their general thoughts of Covid restrictions and the challenges through the pandemic. From the young people that gave evidence, there were mixed feelings about the current restrictions, and I was surprised that generally young people are happy to wear face coverings because they feel safer. I think that it does show that there is still a hesitancy, and although we all want life to be back to normal, there is an element of our young continuing to be quite cautious with Covid. That leads me to my first question. What feedback have you received about the requirement to wear face coverings in school? Is there a demonstrable evidence that this is having an impact on pupils and pupils' behaviour? I think that in the papers earlier on, it highlighted that, although pupils are accepting of wearing face masks in schools, pupils would certainly like the mitigation to be reduced insofar as wearing face masks in class. There are some challenges around communication in classes to wear in the face mask, and, as we get to the Good Scottish Weather, there are also challenges being raised by pupils and staff that wear glasses as well in terms of steaming up on that, and that presents a hazard. Overall, the behaviour has been okay, and pupils are accepting of it once we go over the initial challenge at the very start of it. However, it has been embedded well into school management procedures. School staff, teachers and other ancillary school staff are all challenged with trying to make sure that we adapt the requirements of the mitigations insofar as the day-to-day operations in schools are concerned. I totally agree. I think that we didn't realise how much we relied on lip reading when we were listening to people before we all had to start to wear masks. Good morning, colleagues. We should be mindful of the current circumstance, so we are facing in schools at the moment record high levels of pupil infection and record levels of teacher absence. The issue around all the mitigations, but specifically on face coverings, is whether they are contributing to trying to keep schools open and safe. In that regard, we are in favour of the continued use of face coverings in secondary schools in class. There is not much debate around the use of face coverings and moving around schools from consensus areas that are appropriate. We are currently surveying our members and will be issuing the findings next week. However, I can assure you that the majority of our members, although they accept that face coverings are an inconvenience in teaching and learning, teach us as much as pupils would love to be finished with them, but the majority of our members feel that face coverings should be in place across the winter period, given the higher risks that are associated with that. At the very least, it should be in place until we have 9 per cent plus coverage in terms of pupil vaccinations, because that is clearly a critical issue. We have already seen in the data that the vaccination of 12 to 17-year-olds is impacting on pupil infection levels, so they are lower in secondary school than they are in primary. The key factor there is the vaccination roll-out. We would have wished for that vaccination programme for students to have started much earlier, and we might have been in a better place, but we are where we are. At the moment, we are supportive of the more cautious approach that the Government is taking, because the critical issue is to try to keep schools open and young people in class and being taught by other teachers. Good morning. There is no clear consensus over the face masks from parents. Ultimately, parents want our schools to be open and they want them to be safe, but our children and young people are under much stricter mitigations than any other members of society. The feedback that we get is from a broad range of parents who are scared, who want their children and the mitigations to continue, and there are other parents who do not want any mitigations in school. The parents are concerned that it does affect learning and teaching while sitting in class in the senior school. I have asked me to ask at the Covid education recovery group if it would be considered if they could be removed while sitting in class, but it is just a wide range of views that I can only put forward. Thank you very much, and I will move on to Jim Thullis, please. Thank you, convener. Good morning, colleagues. Not to rehearse anything, that colleagues have previously said in relation to this, but one or two points to make from a school leadership point of view. We are broadly comfortable with where we are in relation to the wearing of face masks within school, if not altogether happy. It is not the most optimal of learning conditions, but we understand entirely and we are prepared to live with this going forward particularly into the winter. It has to be noted that any and all of the mitigations within schools are set within the context of the four Covid harms. At the moment, the priority for us is to have young people in school and learning in a school environment. The wearing of face masks is one of the mitigations that we see as important to sustaining that. The point that Mr Flanagan has made in relation to the level of infection in secondary school and primary school is an important one to note, and we might pick up on that later. In relation to behaviour, it would be very difficult to unravel misbehaviour and base it on aspects such as wearing face masks. There are earlier issues related to young people's behaviour within school, not the least of which is the lack of induction experience that S1 and S2 young people have missed out on in moving into secondary school. Behaviour is not a major issue as such, but if we were to investigate into behaviour, it would have to be done in the context of much more than just looking at face masks. It is not a major problem, but it is something that perhaps we are exploring. If I can ask Gary Greenhorn this question, what are your concerns around maintaining appropriate ventilation and temperatures in the schools over the winter months? The challenges around that are really what we are experiencing just now, albeit that the winter may result in, depending on the severity of it, those challenges. Many councils have already taken steps through increasing the school heating controls to make sure that the heating and the temperature has been increased to compensate for windows and doors being open. The challenge will always be, if we have a severe winter, just how much the heating systems can cope with raising the heating temperature to cope with the external temperatures. That remains to be seen, but so far schools have coped really well with it. However, it does certainly push energy consumption up and, ultimately, the challenges would be around the additional cost of that for many schools, but so far it is working well. It will not be complacent about it, but there are still remain challenges. However, if we face a severe winter, there could be a challenge on some of the heating systems in schools. The capacity of them has not been sufficient to maintain the temperatures, so that is a challenge in terms of the age and stage of heating systems in schools, and we are probably looking at that through a number of networks just now. Thank you very much. I will invite any other witnesses who would like to comment on that. I do not know whether they are able to raise their hand or Mr Flanagan. Yes, thank you very much. I could not find my artificial hand, so I will just use my physical hand. I am sorry about that. Ventilation is absolutely critical going into the winter, and we have made some good progress in the recent period around a stronger consensus on the importance of ventilation. I would just make the point that we were discussing this last December, because, at that stage, aerosol transmission had clearly been identified as the main vector for the spread of infection. That has not been an easy journey in terms of getting some primacy around the issue of ventilation. There was some resistance, for example, around the use of CO2 monitors to do the necessary checks. Again, without totally spoiling our press release next week on our survey, in the majority of schools that are members feel that ventilation issues have been addressed, and it is back to the point that Gary made about the appropriate balance between heating and ventilation, because there is a requirement for school buildings in a sense that they are overheated to allow for the impact of increased ventilation. That does mean really basic things like re-organising the setting periods for when the heating comes on, whereas a boost is required because air is being purged in classrooms after breaks. All those mechanics are really important. Our bigger concern is not so much where local authorities have taken effective action, but it is where we have pockets where members are saying that they do not feel that ventilation issues have been adequately challenged. Around a third of our members have said that they do not feel that ventilation in their school has been properly addressed. We are happy to raise that with individual local authorities. I know that Addis and Coesla are keen to ensure that we have a common approach to maximum best practice in relation to ventilation, but there will be individual challenges. One of the things that has to be really clear from the Scottish Government is that where additional finance is required in order to facilitate improvements that are needed, there has to be a guarantee around that. We cannot have local authorities or schools holding back on making progress in ventilation because they are not sure what will be funded. There has to be a really strong green light there. However, it is required to ensure that our schools are well ventilated in safer places. That has to be a cast iron guarantee that will be on the table in this period pre-winter before we face the real challenges. Thank you very much for that. I am conscious of time and my time limit is up, and I know that Jim Thurlis did want to come in on that, but perhaps as we go around members you will be able to come in on ventilation further down. Can I bring in Miro Fraser, please? Thank you. Good morning to the panel. I wonder if I could raise a slightly different issue, and that is the question of events in schools, which are particularly relevant at this time of year. I am sure that you have probably seen some of the commentary that has been in the media about nativity plays taking place in schools with parents present. I am sure that all parents and young people are aware of what an important right of passage it is to have your children in a nativity play and to be able to watch them, and yet the current guidance is saying that they cannot take place in schools with parents present. However, as a parent, I can take my children to a crowded theatre or a crowded cinema with lots of other people, some of whom may or may not be vaccinated, and yet I cannot go as a parent into a school setting to watch children take part in a nativity play. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that. In particular, whether you think that it is appropriate that the matter is dealt with with a single piece of national guidance, or given that there are quite varied experiences in different schools in terms of Covid rates, whether there is something that there should be some more local discretion on with decisions being taken either at school level or with local authorities, based on the situation on the ground, rather than having a blanket approach? I think that this comes down to transparency, if I am being honest, that ultimately what parents want when it comes to these decisions being made is where what evidence is looked at when they are making these decisions. I would say that, yes, I have received a number of communications about that issue, but ultimately parents need it to be clearly communicated why those decisions are being made and what the thought process was. It is frustrating from parents because you have the national guidance, you then have 32 local authorities, you then have how the headteachers are interpreted in that guidance. We are getting communications from very frustrated parents because some are doing events and some aren't, and yes, where is the fairness in that? On your point of could it go down to local, that is a very good question, that maybe we should put to the education recovery group. I think that it is a very good question, and it is a question that many authorities have been challenged over, as Margaret Querryl has said, from parents. However, going back, the primary concern has to be to keep schools safe. A number of schools are experiencing high levels of staff absences, as Macaulay Larray had outlined earlier on. There is a fine balance to be had between increase to exposure to risk, and that risk could come from increased footfall to schools, which we are trying, within the current guidance, to minimise where we possibly can. I think that the guidance nationally, as Margaret said, is all about communication in terms of how we communicate that to parents, but the national guidance is quite clear on it. Is it a difficult question to say that you effectively allow autonomy to local authorities or autonomy of decision-making to schools? Certainly, if it is autonomy to local authorities, then an authority can make an authority to make decisions. Autonomous decisions going to schools can be problematic, because in a local setting of one school doing it one way and our school doing it differently, certainly the national guidance is there. All local authorities are adhering to it. However, there is interpretation in certain aspects of the guidance, which would mean that some local authorities may interpret it differently. It is a challenge. A lot of authorities are really vexing with it just now. However, I think that the main concern is that, as we have raised earlier on, we have to do everything we can to make sure that we have enough staff in schools to keep the schools open, as far as we possibly can. I know that there have been a number of challenges that have been highlighted for some authorities where they have had to close schools as a shortage of staff, and I think that that point should be made here. I have two points to make about that. The first point is to do with the national guidance, and what we have done over the course of the past year and more in putting together national guidance is to try and align what is happening in schools with what is happening in society. That has caused some rather fraught discussions at times, but the line has very much been to make sure that schools in society are aligned and that you make that point at what you are saying. However, where we have got to discussions on the national guidance is very much in relation to schools being slightly different from cinemas, football grounds and whatever else. If we close down a cinema, then what you are doing is a disrupting young people's education, and we are seeing within the four Covid harms the difficulties that it causes. I would not wish to be in a position where we were closing a school on account of a spread of the virus that has arisen through something that did not need to happen. Schools have been very adept over the course of the last year in devising ways of communicating with parents and putting on events in a virtual forum. I know, for example, that there are many schools that put on Christmas concerts in the virtual domain. It is not ideal. I hope that we are doing just now. It is perhaps not ideal in terms of the way in which we are conducting this meeting, but it is a way of making sure that parents are engaged. Young people are involved in putting on a performance and we get some sort of move back towards a normality within the school calendar and relate to what happens at individual points within the year. I think that first of all, we should recognise that not all schools run nativity plays, so schools will celebrate the festive period with their students. In a range of ways, in most secondary schools, for example, there would be a Christmas concert and a winter concert. The application of the guidance here is the application of the general guidance rather than specifically aimed at Christmas. There has been clarification around Christmas because questions were asked, but the general guidance is about minimising the amount of adult mixing that is in the school environment. That is why we do not have face-to-face parents evenings at the moment. The reason why that guidance is there is to try and keep schools open. If we have outbreaks among staff, schools will have to close because of the staffing shortage. If we have outbreaks among pupils and they are told constantly by the scientists at Serg that it is not in-house transmission that is the key issue, it is that students and pupils are mixing with adults, so why would you potentially run an event that will increase the infection level in your school community? Particularly in the run-up period of Christmas, because it could then impact upon family celebrations over the Christmas period, when there are alternatives in place. I agree with your sentiment that, as a parent, you would love to be on site watching your children taking part in the Christmas celebration. However, we are in the middle of a pandemic. In primary schools, after 11-year-olds, the highest rate has ever been in terms of infection levels. I live next door to a nursery and I still see parents lining up outside the gate each morning and the child being collected by nursery staff taking into the building so that the nursery can be as infection-free as possible. They are minimising the adult mixing in the building so that the nursery can stay open and provide the teaching and learning for the young person. I think that we have to prioritise and our priority at the moment would be to try to keep schools open and safe for as long as possible and not to take what would be a risk—maybe a calculated risk, but it would be a risk in terms of potentially raising infection levels. Again, I think that we are comfortable with the guidance as it stands at the moment because we are still in the middle of the pandemic. Thank you. Can we move on to John Mason, please? Thank you very much, convener. I mean, maybe I could just see Mr Flanagan's there carry on with him. Earlier on, especially in the pandemic, there was the accusation that came to me through emails and so on from some parents that we were over-emphasising the wellbeing of the staff and under-emphasising the wellbeing of the children. How would you respond to that? I am not sure that you can separate the two as cleanly as that because if you do not have staff in schools, you do not have an education process taking place. If you are referring back to the period when we were discussing remote learning versus in-person learning, we have always, from an EIS perspective, recognised the importance of trying to keep pupils in school because that is clearly more beneficial in terms of the relationship between the teacher and the pupils than the challenge of online learning. Online learning, we made it work and certainly in the second lockdown we made it work much more effectively than the first. However, it is a second best because, instead of the way younger children relationship aspect is key to the learning process. The idea that it is teachers versus pupils to me does not ring true because I think that it is about schools being safe environments, and you have to address both of those concerns equally. Otherwise, you do have an imbalance that leads to poor decision making, so I would not accept the characterisation, John. I think that the wellbeing of your staff is important and critical to operational issues, but I do not counter pose that to the wellbeing of young pupils. That is helpful, thank you very much. I can ask the same question to Margaret Wilson from our parents and young people's angle. Is that your reading of the situation as well? I do not know what period you are referring to, but the national parent forum has been at over 70 meetings every week. I have always had a chance to contribute to those meetings. Again, it is always a broad range of views, and we have a young person on the group as well. Usually, the young person and I share the same views. I would not say that Larry is completely right that you cannot separate the two that you need the staff in the school to have it open. Ultimately, parents do not want to go back to remote learning. We want our schools to be open and safe places for our children and young people. However, there is a process in place for parents to get in touch with myself, and I can always give their feedback every week. Ultimately, Llywydd does not come down to that group. Ultimately, it is the clinicians that advise the ministers and the ministers to make the decisions. At least my job, as the parent rep, is to get as much of those views heard in front of the group. That is helpful to hear that there is a variety of views on those kinds of things. If I could move on more to vaccination perhaps and ask Mr Greenhorn in the first instance, what is the feeling about how teachers and pupils are on the uptake of vaccines, just in a general sense? In general, from an added point of view, we always wish that the uptake is higher than it currently is. That is the first thing. Communication has been key to that. There is an acceptance of the vaccines in general terms. However, there has been widespread reported negative comments in the press from various sectors. Overall, our aim is to support the public health ambitions and the Government's ambitions to promote good communication to all the staff and pupils where possible to try to get the vaccination rates up as high as possible. We can protect all the schools in terms of being a safe place to be in, in terms of pupils and staff. We assume that the uptake among teachers is just the same as the wider population. I cannot comment on that just now, John. I am not seeing the current figures to compare teachers with the general population, to be perfectly honest. I have a feeling that those figures may not be available. I just wondered if you had a feeling for it. I am open to what about pupils. I do not myself or any of the panel members how is the uptake among pupils going? Is there a resistance there? It seems to be encouraging, but I do not know whether it is tailing off a bit or what? The last stats that were out, there was a variation across 32 authorities in terms of uptake from pupils. That could be for a variety of reasons. The island authorities seem to be at one end of the spectrum, and some of the central belt authority seems to be at the other end of the spectrum. The emphasis from RDS is to try to support good communication, pure communication, to make sure that we can try to influence the staff and pupils to get the vaccination uptake up to levels higher than it is just now. Do schools have a role in encouraging teachers and pupils to get vaccinated? Just to put a general context to this, we are fully behind the notion that vaccination and the power of vaccination to fight the virus and keep schools open is important. Perhaps to answer in a specific sense one or two of your earlier questions, at the moment the most recent statistics that I saw at the tail end of last week was that between 14 and 18-year-olds, vaccination level is running over 80 per cent, and for a living to 14-year-olds it is verging up to 60 per cent, I think, as the current figure. There has been a wee issue recently, as Gary has picked up there, about the variation across the country. Perhaps I am more worrying a wee bit in relation to the fact that it is plateauing a wee bit. What we are now doing is trying to make sure that we get the message out there that vaccination is important and that the impact that it is having is a positive impact. I think that when you now start to compare primary sector and secondary sector, the virus is now at its highest level within primary sector, and that has moved on from secondary sector. We think that that has very much to do with the vaccination programme. We are very keen on young people being vaccinated and keeping the school environment safe, and we are more than happy to engage with Government already through SERC, but the notion of using schools and enabling vaccination teams to come in and pick up the slack that is there just now and get young people vaccinated within the school environment. Discussions in that, I believe, are on-going just now in relation to the optimal way of using vaccination teams and the school environment to take that forward. I think that to answer your question very generally, fully behind it and supportive of it as a way of keeping schools safe. That is helpful. We have heard among adults that in poorer areas and among some ethnic minorities there has been a lower uptake. Would that be your understanding among pupils? I am not altogether certain about that, John. I do not have the detail of the statistics to be able to back that up. That is useful to know that we do not have those figures. I do not know if any of the other panels would want to come in on this point about vaccination among young people. Maybe I could widen it out and say, well, should we be vaccinating under 12s as well? On your last question, I would say that what I am hearing anyway from parents is the consensus about the vaccinations that should come down to personal choice. I would say that they probably do not want that. Unfortunately, the teams go into schools and parents want to be able to have a conversation with their children or their young person. We all see what is going on on the TV and we can have conversations with our young people. I would say that what I am certainly hearing from parents is that it comes down to personal choice. We feel that it is not up to the schools, it is up to the parents and the children. We have not really discussed the vaccination of 12 to 15 year olds, but it would be down to personal choice. We would have to hear what the claritions and advice are. I suppose that the national parent forum's role would be to have that clearly communicated. We were lucky enough when they announced the vaccination of 12 to 15 year olds. We already had a question and answer session for parents on Zoom, which was arranged with Jason Leitch and Marion Bain, and we were able to have parents come in and ask those questions straight to the people who are making the decisions—sorry, not making the decisions but advising on the decisions being made in Public Health Scotland along. Those sessions have been extremely useful for parents and you can see a drop in the communications that come in from parents to me once we have held those sessions because we have had probably about nine or ten sessions for parents since February. With people like Public Health Scotland and Jason and Marion, who are given the evidence and it is clear and concise and not politicised at all, they ask the question and get the answer. They have been very useful and very well received by parents. Thank you. Good morning to the panel. My questions are really around almost looking ahead, given that this is the Covid recovery committee. Despite some of the best efforts of teachers, pupils and parents, education has been affected by a varying degree. I spoke to an English teacher who was saying that just wearing face masks is making teaching difficult and pupils, as we said earlier on, will all lip read at some level and that communication and learning ability was impaired. My question is really—I want to start with—how do we, as we go forward and start to live with this Covid, how will pupils catch up? Will they catch up? What is the ask from the Scottish Government here? Can I start with Jim Thullis, please? Thank you. Your point is well made. It is important that we start to begin to understand the damage to learning that has been caused. I would suggest that there is an obligation upon Government to start looking in detail at the way in which young people's learning has been interrupted and if it has been damaged. That is part of the, as you are suggesting, longer term move out of Covid. Once we get past the stage of making sure that we are keeping schools open, we are providing learning to the best of our ability, there is a cohort of young people and I have touched on this already in relation to S1 and S2 coming into school. Whose school experience has been disrupted and we need to start to look at the ways in which we start to supplement and augment anything that we discover in relation to things that have been missed from their educational journey? I should probably have noted there that my eldest is a secondary school teacher and my youngest through this whole Covid has gone from primary seven and is now in second year. Is there anybody else in the panel who would like to come in on on that particular issue? I am slightly nervous about the use of the word cat-chop, although it is a quick fix to it. I think that we need to understand some of the damage that has been created to learning process and learning journey of young people. The approach to that will vary depending on what age group we are talking about and what time they have left in education. One of the key issues from the EIS perspective is not so much about learning content and knowledge per se, but it is around the social side of being in school, the building of relationships, the building of empathy with others, and that wellbeing aspect to young people. That is quite labour intensive. Where remote learning creates some isolation for young people, in schools I have a big task about trying to reconnect young people with their peers and reconnect them with their teachers. I have to say that in the Scottish Government education recovery plan, there is nothing in it that I would disagree with in terms of ambition, but I was left underwhelmed by the resource and recognition of the scale of what is required because what we need is more teacher-pupil interaction time across all fronts. You mentioned one of your children transitioning from primary to secondary, so that clearly has been impacted by the arrangements around Covid. Some local authorities are looking at having smaller class sizes in first year so that they get a stronger personalised approach from the teacher. That is what I think is missing from some of the education recovery that is not sufficient focus on groups of pupils who need extra to overcome some of the disadvantage that the pandemic experience has produced. I know that the Government will say that it is looking to employ more teachers, but there are big ambitions around that. There are not enough teachers in Scotland available to meet the scale of the challenges that are in schools at the moment. The Parliament needs to up its ambition around what we need to do to support our children so that the impact of the pandemic is not a lifelong experience. We can address the learning journey. The key focus is on ensuring the wellbeing and resilience of young people. Once we can establish that, the knowledge and understanding around skills and assessments will flow from that. The bedrock is making sure that young people are well adjusted and they are integrated back into school-willing communities. Before I move on to the rest of the panel, I want to widen that out slightly, just on a point that Mr Flanagan makes about teacher numbers. Obviously, the impact of Covid has exacerbated staff shortages with a higher number of teachers absent from school due to Covid. That must also impair our ability to give a more rounded education over the piece. Ask those questions to be answered by Margaret Wilson, how she feels from a parent's forum perspective. I did not understand what you are asking. I am sorry. It's just that sometimes I don't understand what I am asking others. It's more around... My concern is around the fact that our children's learning has been impaired and we need a plan in place to try to backfill that. Over and above what I said earlier on, we have the issue of more teachers' absences as well. There is no doubt that there has been a huge disruption to learning and teaching. Every year, I know that, obviously, Larry spoke there of a certain year group, but fifth and sixth years have never sat exams. Your current S4s were left at home longer, because the senior phase last year was prioritised. Young people have had to make subject choices without meeting parents or teachers. As you have said, you have had children moving from primary up to secondary. Obviously, you have got the transition nurseries to primaries. It is just unbelievable when you are thinking about it. Every pupil has been impacted by it all. I agree with Larry that there needs to be strong resolutions to it. I don't know how they would encourage more teachers. I don't know, as a parent, how that would dem. I don't think that I can answer that question, but I have seen a difference in the name of more support staff. My children have had more people coming in, and it is more support than teachers, but I think that I can only speak from that, obviously, as a parent. My final last point, if I throw this in, is to try to confuse it even further, if I could. Obviously, it highlighted a rise in poor mental health among pupils and teachers alike. I had a figure of something like one in 10 pupils that have now been referred for poor mental health. In terms of looking at our overall recovery from Covid, it is a very difficult situation. If I go to Gary Greenhorn and get his thoughts around what direction from the Government we are looking for and what has to happen to help the situation. I think that, as Ollie Jim said earlier on, there is no quick fix to this. There is a recognition that as a sector, as an education sector over on Scotland, we welcome the additional monies that have been put in for Covid recovery. We welcome the roll-out of the 100-day commitment for the Government, which has already put 1,000 extra teachers into the system. However, challenges that we have in supporting young people on their recovery from the gap in education are the mental health and wellbeing recovery. There is a challenge because absences are still high in schools, not just with teachers but with all the support staff. Although we are providing additionality into the system at this current point in time, that has probably been negated by high-absence levels, so the challenge is there. I think that Larry Tuxton, as well as extra resource, will certainly be needed once we do that gap assessment that was referred to earlier on to just to work out how much of a gap in the learning the young people have suffered over the course of the pandemic. In terms of the mental health and wellbeing, the feedback there has certainly been an increase. There is no doubt about it in terms of the number of young people that have been referred to that. We broadly welcome the additional money that has been put in for school counselling, which has certainly helped. However, that is probably the tip of the iceberg. As we go forward in this, young people's mental health and wellbeing will certainly, once it is assessed fully, be demanded to address and support that further, with, hopefully, extra resources. I know that Jim Thull wants to come in, if you could. Thank you. Let me come back into this. It is to link this back to a question that John Mason posed earlier on and to highlight the fact that the impact of the pandemic both in relation to loss of learning and in relation to mental health and wellbeing issues has not been uniform across the country. There is very firm evidence now that those in those deprived communities have been hit hard by this in a great many ways. It is to make the point further to discussions that began earlier on this week in relation to pupil equity funding and attainment funding, that it is very important in the education recovery plan that the Government has introduced that recognition of the inequitable impact that Covid has had on young people across Scotland has dealt with in relation to the way in which funding gets targeted towards those who have been hit hardest. The whole notion of a school empowerment and enabling schools to respond to specific circumstances within their local community through funding and through access to staffing and support is critical to being able to target resources to the most specific need in a way that will get to young people quickly and in a way that is accessible to them in a form that they can use to compensate for what has happened in relation to the disruption in their learning and the health and wellbeing issues that they now live within in account of what has happened within Covid. My cry is very much for let schools get access to the resources in a way that is getting to front-line problems as quickly as they possibly can. Thank you, convener, and thanks very much to the panel for all coming along today. I am going to go back to vaccinations just for a second, because ultimately we all know that that is the road out or at least being able to manage our lives going forward. Gary, you said earlier on that you do not know how many members of staff are not vaccinated and you do not know what the numbers are. Do you think that we should know how many staff have been vaccinated? I certainly think that there is dialogue regularly with all local authorities, the local public health departments, and that is one of the positives that has come out of this, the way in which there is a collective ambition to try to tackle these challenges head-on. It certainly would be helpful to know the information. It may be that different local authorities get different information on public health. I am just not party to that information in terms of the role that I do within RDS just now. It certainly would be helpful if local authorities could look at how, individually, their authority compares with others. Again, it is a matter of trying to strengthen the communication, both at local authority level and at local school level, to try to increase the number of staff that have been vaccinated. Certainly, any information and statistics that help to increase the mitigation would always be helpful in this instance, Jim. We have the figures in terms of teacher numbers because the monitoring process with teachers is linked to GTCS registration. From memory, it is in the mid 90 per cent, so it is actually higher than the general population for teaching. The figure around support staff is less precise because they are not registered with the GTCS, so there is a proxy taken in terms of the age profile, but that data is presented to CERC. I can reassure the committee that, in terms of teacher vaccinations, it is a very high level of teacher vaccination with most teachers who are not vaccinated having medical reasons why that would be the case. The general point of vaccination is important. I can just make the point, Jim. I think that Scotland has been poorly served by the JCVI, which, to me, has differed around the issue of vaccinations. We would have prioritised school staff right from the start, and we certainly would have moved much quicker on 16 and 17-year-olds. They did not make a non-decision eventually until the UK Government pressed them around the English schools reopening. If we would have had a decision around vaccination of 16 and 17-year-olds, which is running about 80 per cent now, we would have had less disruption. I hope that they make a quicker decision around 5 to 11-year-olds, because vaccination should be offered there to the families of those young people. You are good at this. You will all have received the email this morning from Laura, who is clearly very concerned about young people's health on the basis that five-year-olds and upwards have not been vaccinated. I will go to all the panellists. Do you feel that five-year-olds should be given the option of getting the vaccine? Larry, I will start with you. I suggest that we are in favour of young people being offered that vaccine, and we have said so at SERG. I was surprised to discover at SERG that, partly, there is no licensed vaccine for that age group in the UK at the moment, although, clearly, the USA has started vaccinating that particular group. Hopefully, there is some work going on to make sure that if a decision is taken to allow that age group to be vaccinated, there will be a licensed product available to them. Ultimately, we think that, often, vaccination is a quicker and safer route than just allowing for herd immunity to develop over a longer period of time, because that would be more disruptive to school education. But we absolutely accept that it should be informed decisions that it will be for young people and their families to decide whether they want to access the vaccine if it is made available. Margaret, can I ask you the same question? Ever once that was at my own fault. There is no clear consensus from parents about even the vaccination that is ongoing just now. There are actually quite huge concerns, I would say, that I get in. Luckily, we are working in partnership with Public Health Scotland to answer the parents' concerns. Again, as Larris just said, it will be down to personal choice. Us as a forum will obviously just try and get clear communication for parents on their behalf. I cannot say that there is going to probably be any right answer to that. What I can say is that Devi Shridhar has quite publicly stated that she feels that it is absolutely essential that five-year-olds get given the option to do it, but I fully understand that parents may have a different view. I am going to very quickly move on just now to, Jim, you talked earlier on about the clear division between areas of deprivation and the levels of infection that are there. First of all, there is a question here for yourself, but I also want to go back to Gary. Is the compliance in schools of the rules, the baseline measures that we have, harder to maintain in the areas of deprivation? Will that ultimately, if we do not do something about it at the moment, make it even harder to close the attainment gap? To answer your first question, Jim, there is no evidence that compliance is driven or influenced in any way by deprivation, if you want to look at it in that very crude way. Compliance varies across the country, but for different reasons in different parts of the country it may well be, but I am certainly not aware of any evidence that suggests that it is harder to impose within areas of deprivation. It is a challenge across the country. Sorry, what was the second thing that you were looking for? You made the point earlier on that the areas of deprivation have been hit harder. Is that going to make it harder for us to close the attainment gap? Absolutely, yes. The challenges that young people in those areas were facing pre-Covid have only been amplified by what has happened within Covid. The OECD and the Government's international advisers made it quite clear that learning at home was a significant challenge for young people in the private areas. They did not have access to the hardware, to broadband and to a level of parental support and encouragement that less deprived children had. It is definitely going to increase the challenge presented in closing the attainment gap. There is no doubt in that. Can I get the same questions to you, please? I would have to echo exactly the comments that Jim made in terms of that there is no link to baseline compliance or evidence to suggest that the areas of deprivation are suffering from that, but conversely, in terms of closing the attainment gap, there is a definite link to increase challenge associated with those areas of deprivation. The point that Jim made earlier on is that the Scottish Tainment Challenge Fund, looking at the new ways to distribute that, certainly will give schools autonomy in terms of how they want to address that individually, and the autonomous devolution of that funds to schools is welcomed for that particular point that was raised. Dilari Llywodraeth o'r margarhau, do you want to add anything to that? Just to say that I attended last night as an editor a presentation from four primary school leadership teams in Glasgow around their learning journey during the pandemic. It was genuinely inspiring to hear how schools had coped from physically distributing food parcels to families in the early part of lockdown to maintain a high level of professional development and focus. However, one of the things that they all highlighted in their presentations was the benefit of having some autonomy around how they addressed the issues, because they knew their school community better than anyone at a higher level. In that autonomy, we have been matched, as we have just heard, to funding that allowed them to do things. One of the big challenges that we are facing, the crisis around additional support needs, has been deepened by the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, one in four pupils were recorded as having additional support needs in Scotland, and I am sure that that figure has intensified across the pandemic. That is a challenging scenario if you are in a school community where the majority of your pupils can put their backgrounds and have additional support needs. Unless you have staff in resource in terms of teachers and support staff to address the needs of those children, you will fail and the attainment gap will widen. We have talked about additional support needs and the challenge around it for some time. We need to recognise that the pandemic is actually deepening that challenge, and we need to focus on addressing that quite specifically, if we are going to make progress on it, because generalities do not work if you have a class in front of you where 15 out of 30 kids need additional support and all you have got is one support assistant. That is a really micro-issue that we need to make sure that we are addressing and supporting schools to tackle. I have one very last quick point that I have forgotten, convener. Going back to Murdo's point earlier on, the allowing parents to get into schools to see nativity plays in all the rest of it or whatever else it is that they are doing. I absolutely take on board the purpose of this is to keep people safe, but would you have any confidence to allow parents into the school if they had a Covid passport or a negative lateral flow test? Larry, I will start with you. That is an interesting question. I am in favour of Covid passports outside of schools. If I want to go to the pub or the Celtic game, I have to show my vaccine passport. I understand that. What would a school do if some parents objected to not being allowed into the nativity play because they objected to getting the vaccine? Would a school have to then become the gatekeeper to who was allowed in and who was not allowed in? I think that we would be placing schools in quite an invidious situation there. It is not the theatre of royal, it is not commercial enterprises that have to operate the rules in order to make their profits. Although I can see the validity in what you are suggesting, it might be quite divisive, because only some parents could get in and some would have to be turned away. I do not think that school leadership teams at this time really need that additional headache at this time of year. The principle sounds inviting, but I think that operationally it could be very difficult for schools to try to do that. Okay, thanks for that. Anybody else want to add to that? Yeah, Jim, yeah, and Gary, yep, okay. I emphasise Gary, Larry's point. I was at Hamden last week and you were supposed to have your passport checked before you get in there. It was just absolutely nonsense now, a bit of a larger number, but Larry's point is well made. Who actually at the school door, if you are bringing in a secondary school, bring about 250 to 200 parents into the school, some of whom have their passports, some of whom do not. It is an unreasonable and unworkable way of trying to run any sort of event. The second point is that school leadership teams are under the cost, hugely under the cost at the moment. Just keeping the school working and keeping young people in there and being educated. To try and get them to do that and put them in a situation where it is going to be stressful for them, very stressful and very confrontational for them, I think, is an impractical way of taking things forward. So, exactly the same position as Larry, I think, I'm saying. Thank you. Thank you, Gary. I couldn't have put it any better. School management teams are absolutely stress just now to the limit, to the max, bringing in something that would add angst to the system. It would add bureaucracy, it would add additional workload. I think that when we're actually trying to minimise bureaucracy and workload, and I think that the challenge around the parental angst here would just add a whole lot of confusion to the system. So certainly, as Larry and Jim both said, certainly we would be against that. Thank you. Can we move on to Alex Rowley, please? Thank you. And good morning. Could I maybe start by, I know that when we came out of the lockdown and school started to tilt them up again, there was anecdotal evidence of behaviour change, given that pupils or youngsters had been basically locked up for a while. And, as you made the point earlier, primary sevens coming into S1, they'd spent much of their primary sevens at home. So could I ask just to try and get on the record, what has been that impact in terms of staff, front-line staff in schools? What's the impact and what kind of pressures are they working under? Maybe start with yourself, Larry? Yeah, the impact is slightly different depending on which age group you're dealing with. But certainly in terms of, for example, the transition piece of primary sevens into S1, the feedback that we've had is that schools are having to work very hard to compensate for the lack of effective transition, and more time and energy is having to be spent around wellbeing, so that a lot of children, particularly younger children, had to learn how to re-socialise and reintegrate. That is a big challenge, because if you don't have those positive relationships working in your classroom, then you're up against it. I think that older pupils are a very strong focus on the next steps in terms of qualification pathways, and that in itself is a bit of a catalyst in motivation for them. The anecdotal feedback that I've had is that the emotional wellbeing of pupils has clearly been set back and children are behaving a little bit less mature than you might expect for the stage of that, and it's just a consequence of the fact that their forward pathways have been disrupted. Not all pupils, but a big enough cohort of pupils, are needing a lot of intensive support just in terms of socialisation being part of the school community, so that is a big time stealer in terms of the energy and commitment of staff. It's hard to quantify that, but you speak to teachers, and that's what you hear about how hard it is just to make sure that children are on board and learning effectively. I can move on to Gary with the same question, but has Larry mentioned a few specifics where he's said that where additional funding is needed in terms of ventilation, then it should be clear that that's made available. I think that it was Larry that also talked about the need to increase the staffing levels, but for the Association of Directors of Education, given where we are, what more should Government be doing to support local education authorities or schools directly? That is probably a difficult question, because would ADS refuse any extra resources going to schools? No. I think that there are a number of challenges that were raised earlier on in terms of the full impact of the resource implication, the financial implication, of the energy consumption that is still not known. It's too early to tell what that would be, but we would certainly hope that there would be an expectation if that was demonstrated by that additional funding that was made available to it. Going back to the point that Larry made about probably two things that were important, I think that it might have been generally raised as well. The ASN challenge that schools are facing is a significant one. I think that Larry referred to it as a micro-issue. It's correct in terms of the local schools, but notwithstanding that, there has been a significant increase in ASN demand in school. As yet, the full impact has been quantified, but certainly the rise in demand has been significant. Larry also mentioned the transitional impact, particularly that he mentioned that the pieces are into S1. Again, it's probably too early to tell, but there is an early recognition that our young people's emotional wellbeing has been affected by that, and some steps will need to be taken to redress that. We would welcome the additional money that was brought in to support councillors in schools. That's to be welcomed. We would welcome the additional money that's been put in to provide 1,000 extra teachers and 500 extra school support staff. However, the feedback that we're getting is that, although those numbers are slowly being delivered on the ground, given the significant challenges that we've got near, as I mentioned, more resources would be welcome to address that. Continuing on that theme, Gary, at this time, councils will be putting together their budgets and bringing forward, no doubt, a programme of cuts. Do you know whether education directors are being asked by finance directors to bring forward proposals for cuts within education budgets in the local authorities? I certainly can't speak for every local authority, but most councils will operate with a programme of asking. Asking every individual service in the council area, we put forward some options around where cuts could be lightly. There's no surprise to say that, in terms of the resources overall, local authority finances are certainly stretched just now. That's been widely reported. It follows that it would be right that every authority would ask every single service director to put forward a range of options for their particular area. Education would be one of them. The local extent of that would be determined by every local authority in terms of how it would impact on the effect of the medium-term financial plans that they might have in place at this current moment in time. However, every authority would be different. Moving on to the same sort of question, Jim, but picking up on that last point there. Given the massive pressure on staff, in particular in schools, but given the massive pressure generally on education, is there a case to say that education budgets should be exempt from local authority cuts? Does it not seem contradictory that we're talking here this morning about everything that needs to happen and yet education authorities will be carrying out an exercise right now to find out where they can cut even more from the budgets? You're absolutely right within that, Alex. You leave Covid to the side, perhaps, and I'll come back to that in a moment. However, since pupil equity funding and attainment funding came into the system, there has been a slight of hand that exists within the system and that the moneys are taken away in the way in which Gary has described up front when budgets are top-sliced when they come to schools. Schools are expected then to make good anything that is top-sliced by using pupil equity fund money and attainment challenge money. I think that there's got to be an outing of this at the moment. If we are identifying that there are significant disadvantages that have been visited upon young people and visited upon them in equitably across Scotland, we get away from this notion of top-slicing education budget to make savings and then compensating it through a fund that was designed for something else. Even more so now, and that's something else that's even more acute in relation to what's happened to young people in the back of Covid. If we're going to devolve power to schools in a way that enables schools to be responsive to local need, then devolve the financing of it and don't use a slight of hand to cover up withdrawal of funding with one hand to the giving of funding with another hand, which leaves schools at very best in the same position and not in a position to proactively identify and target need as it arises within the local community. In terms of parents' involvement, is there in your view enough transparency around the finance and budgets that the local education authority has and how that's distributed within schools? Is there enough parent engagement in those processes? More importantly, is there more that needs to be done to engage parents within this whole process? Yes, I would actually say that there does need to be more done. I live in Falkirk and six years ago I set up the Falkirk area parent forum for that very reason so that we could engage with local authorities on educational issues for parents, and it wasn't just open to parent councils. Although I'm a chair of the national parent forum, I've obviously been involved at local level. We have been consulted where I am—I can only speak from where I am— and ideas have been asked, and we've put some of those forward. I do think that it would be very useful if parents could be more engaged on all issues of education. We shouldn't just be a tick box, definitely, and empowering parents would be really good. Parents have many skills and attributes that they could obviously bring to a school community, so I would encourage definitely to have more parental engagement. Can I pick up on a point that you said earlier that there's not enough teachers available in Scotland? My understanding in Fife, for example, is that there were far more probationary teachers available than there was jobs allocated. I certainly heard one councillor when asked about that, and the answer was that we didn't need as many as there was available, so I wonder if you could say a bit more about that in terms of the availability of probation teachers in order to be able to skill up, or do we need to do more around skilling up? The example that I gave you in Fife, for example, there's an absolutely totally unacceptable level of class sizes over 25, but more importantly, over 30. I was a bit flabbergasted to hear a councillor say that whilst at the same time these class sizes. Is class sizes an issue and where you've got, like in Fife, where I've got the figures for them? On the same subject, I've also seen a drop in Fife secondary schools in terms pupils for access in the science classes, a massive drop in S4, which will have a knock-on effect to S5, S6, and teachers tell me they will then get moved out of those schools because there will not be enough kids taking the subjects. There's a lot in there, Alex. I don't know what the convener will give me enough time to answer all that, but we're producing terms of probationers. We have a system whereby each local authority takes a certain number of probationers, but then they can get additional ones, which are fully funded. Some councils were quite good at taking additional probationers because there was a budget saving for them because the Scottish Government were paying for them and they were filling a post. Those were the councils, and I think Fife was one of them, which then couldn't match the probationers, just in vacancies, in the Fries and Galloway was another area. One of the things that we have pushed, because a year ago, we were citing the figure that 10 per cent of the teachers in Scotland were on temporary contracts, and we were pushing up with the Scottish Government to say that this is scandalous in the middle of the pandemic when we need every teacher. There has been some progress around that, and we are looking to create more permanent posts, but we have another challenge in that the school demographic is changing. We have had quite high pupil numbers in primary, which is now tailing off, and that has gone into secondary, so there will be a demand for more secondary teachers, and there is a bit of leeway in primary. What we are arguing for is that, in primary, we should be looking to do something like cut the class sizes in primary 1, in order to focus on smaller class sizes in that early stage, and in secondary, we need a big recruitment drive for more postgraduate students to come in and do the one-year course, so that we have the numbers to make sure that we can offer the full timetables. Teacher numbers are the biggest expenditure on education budgets, but even your question about budget cuts, we would be in favour of reinfencing the money around teacher numbers, so that we get a more direct correlation between the ambition of increasing teacher numbers and delivering them in the classroom. However, it is quite a complex process, and ADS might be in favour of reinfencing education spending, because there will be because they are under pressure across a whole range of services. I think that we need to have some stability and transparency around ensuring that we have the right number of teachers in place. When I said that I do not think that there are enough teachers, you can barely get a supply teacher for loving the money at the moment because of the absence levels and the additional teacher posts. We need to plan ahead, because it is at least a year's running before we have the right number of graduates coming out to make sure that we have the right number of staff in place to allow for things like looking at cutting class sizes, which would be a huge step forward in terms of supporting young people. In relation to the exemplar that you used, you picked Fife as an example. Fife is only one of 32 examples that you could have picked. If you look across 32 local authorities, what you will find are 32 different staffing formulas. The way in which the staff schools in Fife are not the same as in Dundee and it is not the same as in Edinburgh or anywhere else. As well as that, there are also 32 different funding formulas within schools. We discussed equity and the issues around equity this morning and how equity has been further exacerbated through Covid. Is it not about time that we started to look at delivering equity through the way in which we delivered funding to schools and organised staffing within schools? We put a national basic minimum staffing formula and a national basic funding formula, put that out into schools and then allow local authorities to fund schools on the basis of need and top up that funding on the basis of need. It is not until you get to that level that you get away from the issues that you are picking up in the first instance in relation to the inequity of staffing and the way in which teachers coming into the profession are employed. Can we look at something across the country that actually promotes and drives equity as opposed to gets in the way of equity and look at a basic minimum staffing formula and a basic minimum national funding formula and take top-up through PEF and attainment challenge funding as it is just now to make sure that you are addressing need? I think that as a committee looking at recovery, those are important issues that I think we will return to. I am sure that the education committee will also want to look at those issues. I know that we are in the conscious of time and we have run quite well over our time. I thank the witnesses for their evidence and giving us their time this morning. If witnesses would like to raise any further evidence with the committee, they can do so in writing. The clerks will be happy to liaise with you about how to do that. That concludes the public part of our meeting this morning. I suspend the meeting to allow the witnesses to leave and this meeting to move into private for the next agenda item.