 Good morning, and welcome to the 10th meeting of the Education and Culture Committee in 2015. I can remind all those present that electronic devices should be switched off at all times. We begin this morning by taking evidence on the Education Scotland bill from Scottish Government officials the first time that we have considered the proposed legislation. The session will allow us to ask a number of questions, factual questions, around the bill, and we will have a more detailed discussion on the policy intention with the Cabinet Secretary in June. I certainly hope that today's session will inform those of us who have still to make their written submissions to the committee on the bill's provisions. Obviously, we are hoping that there will be an overlap between the Education Scotland bill, work on attainment and certainly the committee's inquiry on the attainment gap. I think that that will certainly work with the bill that will help us with also with our inquiry. I welcome this morning Kit Wyeth, Douglas Ansel, Laurie, Miko and John Parsson. Good morning and welcome to all of you. Can I ask—I don't know who's it—is it Kit, is it yourself that's doing the opening statement if you want to kick us off? We'll do. Thank you very much, convener. This education bill brings forward a range of measures designed to bring improvements across the education system in Scotland. The provisions in part 1 of the bill are a key part of the Government's overall approach to tackling inequalities of outcome. In the context of education, inequality of outcome is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the attainment gap, the fact that children and young people in Scotland from disadvantaged communities perform less well in school. Specifically, the bill proposes a requirement that educational authorities and Scottish ministers—oh, I've lost my train of thought. Sorry. Specifically, the bill proposes a requirement that educational authorities and Scottish ministers attach greater significance to narrowing the attainment gap, making this a priority for all. The introduction of reporting duties will ensure increased accountability both at local and at national level. And these new measures will sit alongside a range of existing activity on attainment. The programme for government announced the Read Right Counts campaign, the introduction of a network of attainment advisers, one in each local authority area, and the Scottish attainment challenge. The challenge is supported by 100 million pounds fund and is being targeted at local authorities with the biggest concentration of primary pupils living in deprived areas. Ministers have also made clear their commitment to creating a secure future for Gallic in Scotland. And part 2 of the bill contains measures which will contribute to this aim. In particular, the bill will give parents a right to request Gallic medium primary education and place a duty on educational authorities to assess the request. The bill will also require councils to promote and support Gallic education and will require that guidance is prepared by Board in the Gallic on the operation and delivery of Gallic education in schools. Part 3 of the bill brings forward a number of measures as part of Ministers' improvement agenda. There are new rights for children under additional support for learning legislation, extending rights currently available to parents and young people to children aged 12 and over who have capacity. A requirement for education authorities to appoint a suitably qualified and experienced chief education officer to provide professional advice on the carrying out of education functions. The introduction of statutory timescales to the section 70 complaints process. This would address a consistent concern that the current process under which Ministers consider complaints about the failure to carry out education duties is overly lengthy. Compulsive registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland for all teachers in independent and granted schools. This will offer assurance to parents that, irrespective of where their children are educated, the standards and quality of the teaching staff are regulated by the GTCS. There are also two technical amendments on free school meals and the entitlement of all children with a guardian to the mandatory early learning and childcare provisions. Neither of these results in any policy change, but they would offer greater clarity and accuracy. Is that all I want to say by way of introduction? We're obviously now happy to take any questions that the committee might have. I'm just going to go straight to questions and we'll start with Mark. Thanks, convener. I have a number of questions on part one of the bill. First, I'd like to ask if I could get a clarification on a definition. In part one section three, there's a specific term about reducing inequalities of outcome experienced by pupils, which result from socio-economic disadvantage. Just ask for a definition of what reducing inequalities of outcome will be and how you're defining socio-economic disadvantage. In part three of the bill, provided that the Government will produce statutory guidance, I think that a lot of that definitional stuff will be picked up in detail in there. What I would say at this point in time is that when we talk about inequality of outcome in the context of education, I think what we're looking to try and do through the bill is to help ensure improved life chances and outcomes for all of our children and young people in all of our schools. I think that when we talk about that, I don't think that we're looking just at exam results, but we're looking at achievement in its wider sense. I think that's very much an integral part of the curriculum for excellence approach. I think that when we talk about CFE levels, we're not just talking about the knowledge that children have. We're looking at the skills and the attributes that they have as well. I think that that's a fundamental part of the broad general education, which takes children through from primary one to S3 in schools, is about giving them the skills and the ambition and the know-how to succeed in whatever they choose to do once they move on beyond school. I spoke earlier about the guidance and the regulation that will be issued along with the bill. If there's any consultation on what will be contained in the regulation specifically, as well as pupils who are disadvantaged because of socio-economic reasons, will that guidance cover a issue such as death pupils who have an attainment gap between death pupils and hearing pupils? Are you able to give examples of what will be covered in those regulations other than the socio-economic reasons? You asked about consultation. We are conscious that the provisions were introduced to the bill without a wide-ranging consultation in advance of the bill being introduced. We have already been having a number of discussions with all our key stakeholders about part 1 in general, but also, indeed, about how we target the support for children from disadvantaged communities and more widely. The regulation making power in section 1 allows us to bring in additional groups of children and young people, and ministers are open-minded about using that power for the bill on introduction. I think that there's no decision taken firmly on that as yet, but it is exactly the kind of thing that you're talking about, children with certain disabilities, looked after children, children from minority and ethnic communities, that kind of thing, where we know that there is evidence that children don't perform as well from those groups. I think that, as I say, ministers are open-minded about bringing forward the regulations for introduction around that. Can I also ask what information is on going at the moment to establish a baseline so that the Government can evaluate performance of local authorities to see whether an attainment gap has actually reduced? I think that the most immediate work that's going on around a baseline is being done as part of the attainment challenge and looking at where things are lying within the authorities that are receiving the funding as part of the challenge. Whatever baseline is put in place for those seven authorities needs to be one that can apply across the country as a whole, because clearly, although there is immediate focus given the funding that's there, the focus needs to be across the country as a whole, and that work will be being developed over the next weeks and months. Finally, the last question is, how will authorities define if an inequality is arisen because of socioeconomic disadvantage or whether that inequalities are arisen for some other reason? I'm thinking about whether authorities will be able to decide that an inequality is arisen as a result of a reason not covered in the bill. Who makes that call? That's the kind of thing that will be picked up as part of the reporting requirement under the bill in terms of how local authorities and ministers are looking to focus and target their efforts to help to narrow the attainment gap. In terms of the evidence that currently exists—things such as PISA, SSLN and other Scottish surveys of literacy and numeracy, and other things that are there to measure pupil achievement and pupil attainment—they tend to use the Scottish index of multiple deprivation. It takes account of where children live in terms of their post-goats in terms of determining whether they are most disadvantaged or less disadvantaged wherever the case may be. That's a relatively well-established means of establishing where children are from. I think that local authorities will also want to take account of their own local circumstances in determining which children they feel need particular help and support. Some of the questions I wish to ask have already been asked, but I wonder if I, just in terms of outcomes, I assume that there will be no target setting in this objective that we will be looking at outcomes on an annual basis. Absolutely. Outcomes across all the children in Scotland, I think that that's the key element of this. We know that we are moving into a phase of having national qualifications that are based around curriculum for excellence. They are already starting to take account of that broader CFE approach around skills and attributes, as well as knowledge. The work around the developing young workforce is an acknowledgement of the fact that, for some children, an academic route isn't necessarily the one that they will go down. I think that there's an opportunity there to allow those children to achieve well and to prepare themselves for later life and for work, whatever their particular attributes and interests are. I should have said good morning, by the way. One of the roles—I mean, I'm glad that we're not going to be target driven in this particular area—it's important that we look at outcomes. One of the key elements in this, two key elements across Scotland, is achieving consistency. Of course, within each local authority area, the appointment of a chief education officer becomes paramount. What skills do you think that chief education officers should actually have? I mean, I think that what the bill provides for is the opportunity for us to set out in regulations the exact qualifications that a person taking on that role should have. What do you think the skills should be? I think that the answer to that question is that it's not necessarily for me to determine that. We've not consulted widely on those provisions before they were put into the bill and our intention is to run a full consultation on the regulations under that section of the bill to ensure that stakeholders get the opportunity to feed in and to inform our thinking about what those skills and qualifications should be. I think that local authorities will clearly have a key role to play in informing that discussion. It's them, after all, who this provision is designed to benefit by ensuring that they have somebody within the organisation who can provide them the professional advice that they need in order to carry out their education functions. It is important, isn't it, that we achieve consistency, that we don't just look at deprived areas within a local authority area and then find that we have one local authority area that's lagging behind our way ahead in terms of provision. How are we going to achieve, following on from the question of the roles of the chief education officer, how do you think that we might secure that consistency? Consistency across local authority. We're not talking about targets, we're not talking about outcomes, so a large part of that responsibility of achieving the outcomes will fall on the chief education officer, which is why I asked the particular question. Regulations will ensure that those qualifications that are required of chief education officers will be the same across the country. We'll be looking for a high standard of appointment across all local authority areas. The area where there is a little bit of flexibility for authorities in the bill is that they will have the opportunity themselves to set out the kind of experience and knowledge that they will be looking for from an individual who they would look to appoint. I think that the regulations will ensure that the qualifications and skills of the individuals in post will be of a certain standard consistently across the country. It's the secretary of that, convener, just last question. In the bill the local authorities are to prepare an annual development plan, I don't know how long these will take, hopefully not too long, which takes account of the authorities annual statement of education, improvement objectives. Who audits or oversees these plans or who will oversee them? The annual statement of improvement objectives comes from the schools act 2000, and that's been in place now since 2001. They generally tend to be local reports that are prepared at local level and are dealt with exclusively at local level. What we're proposing through the bill is that there will be a broader duty on local authorities and on ministers to report every two years, but that will be a report that will be published locally but will also be brought together nationally by ministers in order to see where things are at across the piece. In answer to the question about the existing reports, as far as I'm aware, there isn't much auditing around those reports at this stage. Certainly, nothing done at national level tends to be done more at local level. What we're proposing is that there will be a national level to that reporting process moving forward. What will be the role of the parents in the oversight of these development plans? I think that the bill specifically gives parents a role in the fact that local authorities should be working with them and others in preparing their plans around work to narrow the inequality gap. We also think that by asking local authorities to publish these reports locally, they will give parents and other people within the local community the opportunity to scrutinise and to comment on the work that they're doing. I go back to some of the earlier points that Mark Griffin was pursuing in part 1 of the bill on inequalities of outcome. The bill is designed to reduce inequalities of outcome, which result from socioeconomic disadvantage. I'm not sure what that means. I know that Mark asked that already, but I want to pursue it a little bit. How can whoever is responsible for doing this—a local authority, for example—understand whether a pupil is suffering from socioeconomic disadvantage, and that's what's resulting in the inequalities of outcome, or is some other matter resulting in inequalities of outcome? It's nothing to do with socioeconomic disadvantage. I think that, as we are currently in terms of raising attainment across the country, we are very reliant on the professional judgment and the excellent work that teachers do in school. We would expect that a given teacher would understand where a given child was coming from and would understand their particular needs and their circumstances and what additional help and support they may need in order to achieve as well as they possibly can. I think that that doesn't change. That responsibility of the teacher doesn't— I want to interrupt. Sorry, maybe I didn't answer the question correctly, but we're putting into legislation—we're proposing to put into legislation something that says that we will reduce inequalities of outcome, which results from socioeconomic disadvantage. That will be in legislation. Obviously, those who are responsible for doing that, surely I will have to be able to understand exactly what it is that it's supposed to do and who it is that it's supposed to do it to. I'm still not clear as to how that can be done. If you've got a local authority area with multiple post-scodes or in a school with various pupils from different backgrounds and different family backgrounds and different socioeconomic advantage or disadvantage and you've got various levels of equality or outcomes, in what way will you be able to meet the demands of legislation? If you've got to reduce the inequalities of outcome for those people who are suffering from disadvantage because of socioeconomic conditions, how do you know what to do to actually meet that bit of legislation? I think that I said earlier that the guidance will offer greater clarity on exactly the terms that are used in the bill, the guidance will pick up in more detail exactly what it is that we are meaning by that and exactly how that activity should be targeted. I think that the things like the index of multiple deprivation will be there as an indicator of where these children come from, from the social economic background that they have and I think by looking to measure where, as we do already, the results that we get from the children achieving school will continue to be broken down by the social economic background that is set out in the index of multiple deprivation and I think that that will indicate to us and indicate to local authorities whether or not they are making the progress in respect of the particular children that we are looking to target through the bill. I think that the difference in my question and your answer is that you are talking at a level of the SIMD and I am talking about an individual pupil. What I am trying to understand is yes, the overall picture on multiple deprivation may go up and down in various areas defined by postcode, but at the end of the day it is going to have to come down to individuals and local authorities or individual teachers doing what with individual pupils that they have identified as suffering from inequality of outcome because of social economic disadvantage. What I am trying to understand is what will happen at that level, not at the statistical level but at the individual level. At the individual level teachers already work well with individual pupils to make sure that they are looking to raise their achievement. I think that what the bill requires is for local authorities and for ministers to have due regard to those issues when they are taking account of making decisions around education and I think that is the key point. If we are not asking schools or local authorities to disregard all other considerations in making those decisions, we are asking them to have regard to this as part of the work that they are doing. Individual teachers will know their individual pupils. They will be targeting support to those children depending on their needs and their abilities in any event. This is something else that we are asking them to have in mind, something else to bear it, to take into account of in making the decisions in providing the support to their pupils. I would like to ask a question about who you have consulted with because there is no published consultation on the attainment measures in the bill, but the policy memorandum states that, at paragraph 25, there is a consensus on the need to work to raise attainment and close the attainment gap. We have obviously had evidence from various parent groups and things such that say that they do not get involved in the process. Have you been speaking to parent national parents organisations, COSLA, and also ADES? Yes. The provisions in part 1 of the bill came out as a result of the programme for government, which was only launched towards the end of last year. We could not then run a full consultation on those provisions before the bill was introduced. In the meantime, we have had a number of discussions with COSLA about the provisions in the bill. We have spoken to ADES at great length about them. We have also met with the teacher associations, and we have met with Education Institute Scotland. We have also written to the other teaching units so they are aware of what we are proposing to do. We have met with the national parent form for Scotland and the Scottish parent teacher council too. We wanted to make sure that we had at least a discussion with all of our key partners about the provisions before the bill came into the Parliament. There is a full intention, as I said previously, to consult more widely on the provisions under part 1. Has there been anything in your conversations that any of those groups have brought up at this stage with regard to the bill that they have concerns on? I think that generally speaking, at a high principal level, there is generally an understanding that we need to continue to focus efforts on narrowing the attainment gap, and I think that there is a principal support from everybody. I think that COSLA did raise some concerns. I do not feel that the provisions in the bill were particularly necessary. I think that they felt that there was a lot of good work going on already, and we should be relying more on that existing work rather than placing additional duty on local authorities. On George's point, the bossy memorandum at paragraph 25 states that there is consensus on the need, as you have just mentioned, to work to raise attainment and close the attainment gap. That is one of the most critical issues. If you raise attainment for all, or do you close the gap? You say that you do both. If you raise attainment for all, does that close the gap, or do you not just think that everybody just moves up and the gap effect will remain similar? I completely understand your point. The answer to that is that where we want to get to ideally is that those pupils who are performing at the top continue to increase, but at a slower rate than those at the bottom. We would like to see that everyone moves up, but that the gap is narrowing throughout that process. Obviously, we are taking evidence just now on the attainment gap as part of our inquiry, and something that has come up is that people do not understand what we are measuring and what is out there. Earlier this morning, in answers to the questions, you have used the phrase inequality gap. They seem to be quite interchangeable, except for that they are different things and they mean different things. I am just wondering whether you mean different things when you say it, or are you using it as an interchangeable word? Atainment gap and inequality gap? Inequality gap. Because they are different things to other people? Yes, I think they are. I am not sure that I meant to say inequality gap. I do not think that that is necessarily a phrase that I am familiar with. Atainment gap, I think that we are pretty clear on what that is, and I think that we are talking about inequalities of outcome. When we talk about that, I think that we are pretty much referencing the same thing, that what we are talking about is that some pupils perform well and others do less well, and it is about trying to make sure that everybody does better. When the phrase was used on the social economic pattern, we understand that there would be inequalities there, but that does not necessarily translate to, for every pupil, their ability to learn and to succeed. What we are trying to get across to people when we are getting evidence is that we are talking about attainment and not where it seems to be the focus in part one of this bill. Do you agree with that? I think that our focus is very much on, as I have just described, on raising attainment for everybody and ensuring that those who are in the lowest performing groups increase better than everybody else. That is the driving force behind the provisions in part one of the bill. Liam McArthur It is convenient and apologies for being slightly late as I result with transport problems this morning. Following up the convener's question about closing the gap in raising attainment for all, we have had witnesses before us previously who wrestled with this dichotomy. If you are raising it for everybody, then all you are doing is moving the gap upwards a notch. From the discussions that you have had with Cosla and Addis and others, is there a feeling that in order to close this gap while raising attainment for all, there needs to be a greater targeting of resources and effort on those who are seen to be underperforming? I think that there is not a recognition. I am sorry to follow that up. Is that the priority of ministers as well? I think that the priority is around raising attainment for those in the lowest performing groups, absolutely, but it would be wrong to say that there are not aspirations around improving achievement for the highest performers as well. I think that the focus is very much on those who are in the lower performing parts of the cohort at the moment. I mean, hence things like the attainment challenge where, as I said this in my opening comments, is that the focus of the 100 million pounds, the focus of the attainment challenge is around the poorest performing pupils in the primary schools. I apologize again that I did not hear your opening remarks, but I think that some of the problem around that attainment fund is that it is focused on areas that ignore those who may be struggling to attain to the full potential in areas outwith those that have been designated by the SMID criteria. Your point about aspirations of those that are highest performing, does tend to suggest that those with the sharpest elbows will make most of the opportunities that arise out of this, and the gap will not decrease, and if anything is at risk of expanding more widely. So what in this bill will actually help close that gap, rather than restating the aspirations that, as you fully admit, everybody has had and has had for some time now? I mean, I think that the bill is part of the answer. I don't think that the bill is the complete answer to what we're wanting to do around narrowing the attainment gap, and I think that it does sit alongside the things like the attainment challenge, like raising attainment for all, like the, you know, the read, write, count campaign, and the other work that is going on across the piece. I mean, it is, you know, the bill is one element of the Government's work around raising attainment and around narrowing the attainment gap. Thank you. I won't go on, but I do feel that you're focusing on disadvantaged communities in your opening statement, and the bill states, result from socioeconomic disadvantage, and I have to say as a member of Parliament for the Highlands and Islands, you know, that just doesn't work up there. You could have someone from a, you know, very low attainment living next door to a multimillionaire, and my concern is that that individual is not living in a socially disadvantaged area, and quite often not from a disadvantaged family, if you like, and my serious concern is that that person will be missed out. However, I've gone to my own questions and just a statement, but I'm sure that that will continue, but I'm concerned at your opening statements. The point that George made on COSLA just before I come, you may have been having discussions with COSLA, but we've got a paper from the 23rd of April, less than a week ago, and they're certainly not happy with what you've brought forward. The duty in part one is unnecessary, doesn't enhance local democracy, it duplicates existing legislation, it's not been consulted on, why will local authorities report to ministers and not to their communities? So it's fundamentally challenging, it's something that we can dismiss COSLA if we like, but it fundamentally challenges local democracy and why was there no public consultation in what's now the headline section of the bill? Now I know you said it came through in the programme of government, but I have been here for quite a few years and it's bad legislation that's not consulted on, so you know, it's going to lead to a lot of difficulties for this committee as well. So can you maybe give us an explanation about the discussions you have been having with COSLA because you've certainly not persuaded them that you've done a good job in bringing forward this headline section of the bill with no consultation? Okay, I mean, firstly on your initial statement, which if I may just reply to that briefly, I think that we are conscious that it isn't just children from the most socially disadvantaged areas of Scotland who perform less well, absolutely. And I think that's why there is that provision in section 1 of the bill, which enables us through regulation to extend the provisions of the bill to other groups of children and young people. I think, as I say, ministers are open-minded about using that and clearly if there's a feeling that we should be doing that, then that's absolutely what we will do. I think that in terms of the conversations... The regulations may even come after next year, we don't know. I mean, again, I mean, you know, if the committee were to ask to see those regulations, we can obviously, you know, look to bring them forward. So, I mean, I think that in terms of our conversations with COSLA, I think that, you know, as I say, we have met with them on a number of occasions. I think you are correct to say that we haven't necessarily persuaded them of the value of these provisions, as I said in response to Mr MacArthur. I think that we see that the bill is one element of our work around raising attainment. I don't think it is the solution by itself, but I think it's an element to help give it that additional profile, to enhance the focus that is placed around it, I think would be a useful part of what we're doing. The bill provides for local authorities to publish their reports, as well as to report to ministers. I think that our expectation and our discussions with COSLA have been very much that that publishing of reports locally is about enhancing local democracy. It is about enhancing local accountability and it is about saying to the people in the local authority areas that this is what the authority is doing to help to narrow the attainment gap. So there is local accountability there, as well as that accountability to ministers. I think it is a new element. I think that we feel that ministers and local authorities should both be accountable to Parliament for the work that is being done, and that is why we're asking local authorities to provide information to us so that ministers can include that in what they say to Parliament about where things are at. I think that that national accountability is actually quite an important part of this, as well as the local accountability for which the bill provides. On the public consultation element, I think that, I don't know, I have much more to say than what I said already. I think that the provisions have come late in the day and we've undertaken to do full consultation on them as we move forward in advance of stage 2 and we will absolutely do that, and COSLA will continue to be very much in the forefront of our discussions around that. I sincerely hope so. I now move on to a couple of questions on Gaelic. I was really quite surprised that I assumed that the bill was going to increase the provision of Gaelic medium education. There are 11 paragraphs on Gaelic. I actually had quite high hopes for Gaelic, but in actual fact it doesn't create any entitlement to Gaelic medium education, but it creates a statutory process to assess parental requests. What is the statutory process to assess parental requests? Is that just a phone call saying, no, sorry, you're not getting it? What does that mean? Does the bill intend to increase provision of Gaelic medium education if it doesn't require local authorities to provide it? Morning. Good morning. For a moment I thought I was in the wrong committee meeting, but I'm glad I— Oh no, we've got a wee bit here. Oh we've got a wee bit here, so I'm happy to respond to that. There are a few things here that are relevant to your question. There have been parents that have been talking about a right to Gaelic medium education. You yourself used the word entitlement and, as you say, as you point out, the bill clearly sets out a process following a parental request. If we did have a right or an entitlement, both of these would need a process to follow the right or the entitlement. If parents felt they had a right to Gaelic medium education, we'd still have to say for how many children, in what area, can we get a teacher? As soon as we ask those questions, which are crucial questions for local authorities, we are into a process. What we're trying to do is put in the bill a very good process, a process that is consistent throughout the country, a process that is open and transparent, and a process that is timed. None of those things are in place at the moment. A process that will give parents confidence that their request will be responded to. I don't think that we can avoid process. A process in place. The Gaelic school in Inverness is expanding at a rate of knots due to parental demand, which I'm obviously very happy with. But surely every parent in Scotland has a right to phone their education authority and say, like my child, to learn the Gaelic language or the Gaelic medium education? Surely there's a process there at the moment? Every parent may approach a local authority and may request Gaelic medium education for their children, but there is no consistent process. Sorry. What's different about this? What's the statutory process? Can you explain? I know it's consistent, but what's different about what happens now? Some parents, without identifying any areas of the country, some parents have been knocking on doors for 10 years requesting Gaelic medium education. In that request, which has been prolonged, and I think in the SPICE report on this bill, the SPICE report also identified that some parents have been asking for far too long and it comes to the stage where the children that they requested Gaelic medium for have moved on and it's no longer relevant to them. But there's no guarantee they're going to get it? There is a guarantee that a certain process must be followed in an open, consistent and timed manner. But the process could still lead to refusal? The process could still lead to refusal if certain considerations are not met. For example, if there were not numbers and if the local authority couldn't secure a teacher. Just my final question, convener. In the policy memorandum paragraph 30, the process has the potential to lead to a faster growth of Gaelic medium education. Then paragraph 31, local authorities have the opportunity to send children to neighbouring areas. The reason why these education authorities promote Gaelic is not currently specified. Are you saying that if someone applied for their child for Gaelic medium education, would there be a statutory duty on local authorities if they didn't have the resources to provide that in their local authority? Would they then have an obligation, you've got an opportunity to send children to neighbouring areas, would there be an obligation on local authorities to meet that parent's demand for the child and to ensure that the child went to a neighbouring local authority in order to learn Gaelic? Is there some guarantee at the end of that? That is something that happens already. There are already young people that go to other local authorities in order to receive Gaelic medium education, but that wouldn't form a part of the duty on a local authority to send a young person across the border to another local authority. I'm finding it difficult to find out what's different about that. If a parent has to wait 10 years and it's too late, how are they going to get their child into Gaelic medium education or at least to learn Gaelic? What's this bill going to do for a parent that wants a child to get Gaelic medium education? What's going to be better than what's already there? I just don't see that. I'm seeing a process, but I'm not actually seeing an entitlement or a duty or whatever at the end of the day. That's what I'm finding difficult. This is not just a process, but it's a good process. It's a good process that entitles parents to submit a request. As soon as parents have submitted that request, that triggers off a process that has to run through in a certain time. That process will be open and transparent. I understand all that, but you've already said that it can still result in refusal. Yes, indeed. But you've still got a bit of bureaucracy to see that they've gone through the due process. At the end of the day, is it really going to lead to further demand and further provision of Gaelic medium primary education in the 32 local authorities in Scotland? That's the final question. I haven't got the final answer. I'm looking for it. I'm sorry I've had to ask more supplementaries, but I'm asking them because I haven't understood yet. I'm confident that it will lead to a faster growth in Gaelic medium education throughout Scotland. Let me just give one statistic. We have 93 Gaelic early years groups—little people age 0 to 3. We have 93 and we have 58 primaries. There is the potential in parents that have their children in the 0 to 3 to request Gaelic medium primary. We're putting a process in place for that. You said also that it could lead to parents being refused. We're saying that, but you offered that back to me. We felt that we had to put a threshold of five young people coming forward and there's a reason for that. If the threshold is not met, if there's only two children, we thought it was reasonable that in this situation, if there's only two or one or three, it's reasonable for the local authority to look at the procedures and say, in our estimation, or in the process, the bill is set down, we reckon that the threshold has not been met, and therefore we will not go forward to Gaelic medium education. There are other members who want to come in, so I'm going to bring them in now. Liam Kerr indicated that one of the reasons that local authority may not be in a position to provide or respond positively to our request is inability to recruit teachers now. As a committee, we've heard evidence over recent months about the inability of local authorities to recruit a whole range of teachers in a number of subject areas. We've heard of difficulties in providing the materials for science education, for example, at a primary level and a secondary level, so I think we're painfully aware of the stresses and strains on education budgets and local authorities right across the country. What does this bill do in terms of placing the provision of Gaelic medium education in that list of priorities that education authorities are going to be wrestling with anyway? The bill lists recruiting a teacher as one of the key considerations that a local authority must take into account when it is assessing the request from parents for Gaelic medium primary education, sorry, let me be specific. The bill doesn't take any particular steps to increase the recruitment or the education or the placing of Gaelic medium teachers. We have a range of measures that are being taken forward to increase the numbers of those going into the profession and they have been quite successful recently. We have seen the numbers of those going into Gaelic medium teaching increase over recent years and they've been quite encouraging. There are still gaps. It's probably one of the main obstacles that we are concerned about and indeed local authorities are looking at the provisions of this bill. This would be one of the key areas of concern for local authorities. That's all very well, but can we secure a teacher? The Government is already requiring fairly specific provisions in terms of teacher pupil ratios that a number of local authorities in COSLA as a whole have raised concerns about in terms of what they see as a straight jacket that they're being put into. If you apply this provision as well within this bill, are you not surely just adding to the difficulties that they've got to deal with in terms of meeting all of the expectations that are placed upon them by Government? I don't think we're adding to the difficulties because the process that we're putting in place in this bill is a process that we put in the hands of local authorities. As they go through the various considerations in this process, it is for them to look at the very important question, can we secure a teacher? There will be work to do with board Gaelic about teacher provision in that year, but I think that we're placing this consideration in their hands to assess the possibility of securing a teacher. It's only a question of whether or not we'll be able to secure a teacher rather than the priority that they attach to this as opposed to the other considerations that they are having to deal with in terms of either providing teachers to cover particular specialisms or providing materials to support that teaching provision. The only issue is about whether or not the recruitment of a teacher would be problematic. No, I think that there's a number of issues for the local authority and we've tried to list them in the process. Listen to the responses that you gave to me very briefly. The concern that I have is that this bill is at risk of raising expectations on Julia amongst those who've been putting these requests in for some time. It follows on from an SMP commitment in the manifesto to examine how we can introduce an entitlement to Gaelic media education. Parents cross-referencing that with what's in this bill and the process that local authorities will have to go through. I think that there is a real risk here, is there not, that they're going to come away from this, thinking nothing's changed here at all. Local authorities will still be able to fob us off, albeit in a time frame than was the case before. I understand the point about fobbing us off. I think that some people will look at things and say that's fobbing us off, but other people, local authorities will look at the same issues and say that these are issues of substance. If there's not a case of fobbing people off, this is an issue of substance that we have to consider, be it teacher, be it cost, be it location, be it a building to house the Gaelic medium education in. I still think the same point, coming back to the manifesto. The manifesto uses the word, as you referred there to, of an entitlement. When we've looked at this, when we've consulted on this, we've taken the view that any entitlement still needs an element of process to be delivered and to be considered. What we've tried to do here is to deliver a good process that responds to the requests of parents. I hear what you said about process. I'm much more interested in the entitlement that we allied to. What are we doing to promote the entitlement as opposed to hinder where we're going by a process? In the Gaelic section of the bill, there are three principal areas of interest. The one is parents can submit a request for Gaelic medium primary education. Forgive me, we've heard that. Yes, I'm moving on from that. I want to know what we're doing to promote with local authorities the need. At the end of the day, I'm interested in the children and the parents who wish to have the service fulfilled, not in the process of how they get there, although that is important. So what are we doing in this bill to promote the entitlement of Gaelic learning in local authorities? I was just moving on from the process. The bill will contain a duty on local authorities to promote and to support Gaelic education from 3 to 18. It will include a duty on local authorities to promote to parents that they have a right to request Gaelic education. It will also put a duty on local authorities where Gaelic learner education or Gaelic medium education is in place that local authorities have a duty to promote it. The bill will also contain a duty for local authorities to support Gaelic education. Those things are in the bill. There, as new duties, they will be developed further in the guidance that Bordna Gaelic prepares as a result of the bill. That will spell out in detail what needs to be done in terms of the promotion of Gaelic throughout Scotland. Thank you very much. Regarding the additional support needs section of the bill and the particular right to extend the rights of children from 12 to 15, my first question is about paragraph 51 of the policy memorandum, which explains that extending the right to make placing requests to children can mean that children attend a school that the parent does not agree with and so cut across the duty of a parent to ensure that their child is educated. Can you explain in more detail what is different about placing requests compared to other rights in that legislation? Yes. There was concern about the extension of placing requests in the consultation when we proposed to extend all of the rights. The consultation response indicated that there was concern from parents in particular about that extension. The very particular concern is that, under the additional support for learning legislation currently, parents and young people can make a placing request to a nursery primary school or special school, independent special school or granted school in the local authority area, their own local authority area, another local authority area or indeed to England, Wales or Northern Ireland. If that right was extended, it was conceivable that a child could end up in a school that was in a very different part of the country from their family and that that would be disruptive in terms of the family life. As a result of that, the decision was taken not to extend that right both in relation to the consultation response but also in a practical sense, having, if we had extended that right, that would be the potential outcome. It is in relation to that point, though, and the independent mediation services as well, that a support service is being established. Can you give me more details on what that support service would look like, who would be involved in that? The consultation also indicated that one of the concerns was that, if children's rights were extended, there would require to be support in place for children to be able to use their rights, and in response to that, and in developing the proposals that we have brought forward in the bill, we worked out for each of the rights what would have to be done by the child in order to use their right and what the associated process was. As a result of that, it became apparent that there would be a requirement for four different types of support for children, advice and information, advocacy support, legal advice and representation, if a child was going to take a case to a tribunal, for example, and then there's a fourth part, which is that there have been cases in the past where it hasn't been possible to get the child's view independently of other parties, either the education authority or the parents, and therefore it's been difficult for the child to influence processes. Therefore, part of the service will be about getting the child's view independently of others to feed into the processes so that we're clear about what their position is. Our intention, indicated in the financial memorandum, is that we will extend the services that are currently provided by Children in Scotland through Inquire, which is advice and information services. We will try to build into a partnership with Children in Scotland, those other services, so that the four services will sit under one organisation in recognition that the child may move between them depending on which rights they're using, so we're trying to bring them together so that the child can move backwards and forwards depending on the service that they need, so there's a consistency of approach to that. Thank you for that. You spoke about the process in your answer. Is it a similar process, is it the same process that currently happens for 16-17-year-olds? Same process. Okay. Finally, why was a test of best interest introduced for young people? What is best interest? How is that defined? Secondly, was that consulted on with young people themselves? Okay. The best interests part was introduced alongside the changing capacity definition that we've brought forward. There were concerns that, for this group of children and young people, they may use their rights in a way that would undermine their assessed needs. For example, an education authority and a family have asked for child's needs to be assessed. It's established that speech and language therapy is required. The child, quite rightly, perhaps has a disagreement with someone providing services for them, a speech and language therapist, for example. That child doesn't want to engage with that person anymore and that's perfectly acceptable, but they use their rights to try and remove that support, which, as identified, will help them. For this group of children and young people, it was decided that we would introduce a best interests element. That allows a parent to have an appeal of the child's use of their rights in order to safeguard that their rights are being used in their best interests. He asked about what his best interests mean, and we will bring forward guidance specifically on what does capacity mean, what does best interest mean, and also the assessment of all those things. That will be statutory and non-statutory guidance, because we want to set out in the statutory guidance the explanation of the legislation, but we also want to bring forward guidance about practice on some of those matters that are new in that area. Was it consulted on with young people? Oh, sorry. The original consultation, which was on the principles of whether or not children and young people should have rights, was consulted on, but we haven't consulted on the specific provisions with children and young people. We have discussed them with a range of stakeholders, including the National Parents Forum, ADES, COSLA, and others that you would expect, but not children on that aspect. I know that I said fairly, but are you going to? Is that a plan? When we bring forward the guidance and the regulations associated with the bill, we will consult on all of that. With young people? Yes, with children, yes. Okay, thank you. I want to continue our discussion more about the practicalities of extending those rights to children 12 to 16. You have said that it is important that we get the child's view, and it absolutely is. However, how would their view be taken into account and what waiting would their view have in arriving at any decision? In general terms. In general terms? These are all questions in general terms. No, in general terms. I was thinking more in case, for example, in mediation, there would be a specific element there. The way that it would be taken account of is that, as part of the decision that we can process, alongside the parents' view, alongside the education authority's view, alongside all the people that would be making the decision, it would have equal waiting to all the others. That is the intent. We wish that children are able to influence the provision that is there for them, and therefore there would be equal waiting as part of that. It says in the memorandum that the bill would extend rights to children between 12 and 16 where the education authority considers that they have capacity. How will the education authorities assess whether they have capacity, and who will make that decision that they have the capacity to exercise those rights? As I said, we will bring forward guidance on how that assessment will take place. In our consideration of those matters, we are aware that there will be a significant amount of information available from the child's records, from the experience of teachers and the family who know the child well for the 11 years and plus that they have been part of the system. There are circumstances in which it will be extremely clear immediately whether or not the child has capacity or not because of that information. In some circumstances, that will not be immediately apparent. There are other elements already within the bill that allow assessment to take place. Those would be enabled in order to make a specific assessment. For example, a psychological assessment in those cases. We are expecting that, for the most part, however, that the information that is already available about the child would be used by the education authorities, the education authority that is required to make the decision, to come to that view. My final question is that you said that children's view and parents' view would have equal weighting, but, if there is a degree of disagreement between the child and the parent about the correct way forward, whose view is Parliament? In the circumstance in which the child is using their right in a way that the parent disagrees with, there is within the bill the provision to allow the parent to make an appeal of the child's capacity decision and the best-interest decision. That is the way in which the parent would be able to ask for that review of the use of the right to make sure that it is in the best interest of the child. Although the two rights are equal, there is a practical measure to safeguard for parents that the child's use of the right is proper. In terms of 6-19 and the powers under the 1980 act to bring complaints to Scottish ministers about education authorities failing to undertake statutory education duties, I note the bills proposing to restrict those further, specifically in relation to the ASL Act 2004. It is also setting out, I think, some specific statutory process or part of the complaints process to follow under statutory regulation provision. There seem to be fairly limited numbers of complaints that have been made, so I am struggling to understand what the demand has been to restrict the provisions further and to further set out statutory specification of the process. Can you enlighten us? Yes, absolutely. There have been cases in the past in which section 70 complaints, particularly around additional support for learning, have been used to submit complaints about matters that are within the remit of the tribunal, the additional support needs tribunal for Scotland. There have been circumstances where Scottish ministers have been considering matters for which there is a specific body set up with expertise to consider those matters. There are difficulties in that Scottish ministers may make one decision on that matter, but the tribunal would reach a different decision potentially. Both of those can be appealed to other legal bodies at a later point. To be absolutely crystal clear, but also to ensure that we make use of the body that is designed for the purpose, we have chosen to restrict section 70 complaints only in relation to the matters that can go before the tribunal and all other additional support for learning rights. Anyone could still bring forward a section 70 complaint, but in those ones around co-ordinated support plans, placing requests, etc. We want them to go to the body that was established for it, so we have brought forward that amendment. In relation to the point that you asked about why timescales, there was some concern about the length of time that section 70 complaints were taking to be concluded and there was some dissatisfaction highlighted by parents about that process and about that system. We had brought forward some proposals to try to resolve those concerns. We consulted on those proposals and the consultation was not favourable towards those, so we have tried to address the original concerns by bringing forward timescales to try and reduce the length of time that complaints take in this area. What is the likely impact on the number of complaints that have been brought forward by taking ministers out of processes that should be more rightly dealt with by the tribunal? We have had five complaints on one occasion when there have been five complaints linked together in that type of matter. All the rest have come forward, so we do not think that that will create a reduction in the normal running of section 70 complaints. Parents would usually choose the tribunal as a matter of course. There are a far higher number of complaints going to the tribunal around those matters than there are for section 70. The reason that we are coming to the ministers was a confusion as to the way in which the tribunals worked or was it that they did not think that they did not necessarily get the response from the tribunals that went down the ministerial route? No, I believe that you are bringing this matter to the minister's attention and I think that that was the attraction for it in those particular cases. The cases were linked together to try to establish a systemic failure in a particular area, so that it is slightly more complicated than perhaps setting out for you. Can I move us on to the section of the bill that is about independent and granted schools and the issue of registration? My understanding of the policy intention is that there is a requirement that all teachers who will be working in independent and granted schools will have to be registered with the General Teaching Council for Scotland. I think that that may have come as a surprise to some people who were not already registered with the General Teaching Council for Scotland, but that aside, can you enlighten the committee because you talk about the phasing in of this particular policy? How long that phasing in is likely to be? In terms of the numbers, which I think will influence the phasing of the new requirement, we understand that there are around 730 teachers at the moment working in independent schools who do not have GTCS registration. There are about two thirds of those who are likely to have other qualifications, which would mean that they would be enabled to immediately register with GTCS where the requirement is to come in. There are 730 who are not registered with the General Teaching Council for Scotland, out of a total of around about 4,000. I think that our expectation is that a period of around about two years is when we would expect that that number of people to seek the qualification that they would need. Therefore, the actual requirement would kick in in a concrete fashion a couple of years after the commencement of those provisions. What we are talking about here is that there are roughly 730 who do not register, but you are expecting around about 500 or so of them, 500 plus of them, can affect whether they get automatic registration as soon as they have not applied. Would that be a fair way of putting it? We are talking about a relatively small number of around 200. Do we know what range of qualifications those individuals have? Are they totally unqualified or do they have some qualifications? What do those individuals teach? I do not know that we know that they ask that question. We can certainly look to try and find some more information and write to the committee if that would be helpful. I am just curious that there are 200 plus individuals teaching, albeit in independent schools, without qualifications or with qualifications that are at least an equivalence to allow them to be registered almost automatically with the GTCS. I am just slightly surprised by that. I am just wondering what level of qualifications they have, but I would be interested to know what information they have on that. My second question is about the policy memorandum. It talks about discussions that you have had with key stakeholders at paragraphs 104 to 106. I am just wondering whether or not there has been further updates since the publication of the policy memorandum on the issue and what those discussions have been about and led to. I am thinking of questions like how does impact on the ability of those independent schools and graduated schools to operate? Are they supportive of the changes? Does it particularly impact on certain schools, as opposed to other schools, or is it evenly spread across to all of the schools? The conversations that we have had predate the publication of the policy memorandum, and we have not had any further discussions since then. I think that we spoke with the council for independent schools at that time. I think that they were supportive, in principle, of GTCS registration for all the staff. I think that the intention, what the bill provides for, is for us to make amendments through regulation to require this. Those regulations are actually, certainly in respect of independent schools, are affirmative regulations. There will be a full consultation with all the schools and others affected by that as part of that process before those regulations are brought forward. That is an on-going process rather than one that has happened already. Are you aware of whether or not this is an issue that just affects it roughly evenly spread across the independent sector, or is it particular schools that have a lot of unregistered teachers? In the main, most of the independent schools that were aware of have the vast majority of their teachers already GTCS registered or will be able to get that requirement quite quickly. I think that there are, potentially, a small number of smaller schools who generally will not have a majority of staff in that situation. I was wondering whether it was affecting the larger schools or was it particular some of the smaller schools that perhaps had that problem? I think that it is more likely to impact more on the smaller schools. Any further update that you can give us would be welcome. Can I move on now to Colin? Thank you, convener. I would like to come back to the post of chief education officer. I would like to pick up on a couple of the comments that were made earlier on. Section 20 of the bill requires education authorities to appoint the chief education officer with experience and qualifications as set out by the Scottish ministers on regulation. Earlier on, in response to a question from Chick Brody, the comment was made that it is up to the local authority to decide on experience and qualifications. It seems like there is a little bit of a conflict there. Apologies if what I said was unclear. I mean, I think that what section 20 provides is that it says that an officer appointed must have the qualifications prescribed by ministers in regulation, so that is quite clear. The minister has set the qualification and the experience that the authority considers appropriate in relation to carrying out the functions that are provided there. So it is a mixture of the two. It is for ministers to set out and regulate on the qualifications and for the authorities taking account of that to consider the experience that they think is appropriate for that person in their local area. I will be looking for the Scottish ministers to lay down the baseline and the local authorities then add to that according to what they need locally. I think that what ministers are going to set out is the statutory qualifications that they must have in order to carry out that role. It would then be for an authority to make an appointment based on candidates who meet those criteria according to the experience and the skills that they feel are particularly appropriate for them locally. It may be, for example, that they have candidates coming forward who have particular experience of working in an urban area. If they are in an urban area, they may feel that is most appropriate for them. It is for the authority to take some of that into account in determining their appointment. Again, earlier we talked about the role of the chief education officer and you stated that it was to provide advice, so they would not have an operational role. They are there to provide advice, so presumably they are a centre of expertise. Who did they give advice to? To the judges, they would give advice to the council. Education legislation has changed quite a bit in recent years. It is quite a complex landscape and I think that part of our thinking around this is that it is useful for the council to be able to draw on advice from a senior officer who can understand that landscape and give them the advice that they need in the carrying out of the council's education functions. Would that be an independent role or would it be a role reporting to the director of education? We are not going to prescribe exactly where within the local authority hierarchy that individual should sit, but they will be within the local authority. Presumably you are not envisaging that there are going to be 32 new appointments of senior staff at considerable expense. Would local authorities be within the right to appoint an existing officer into this role? Absolutely. In the majority of cases, most authorities already have people carrying out that kind of director of education role who would have the kind of qualifications and experience that the bill envisages. I think that where that does not exist, that is what the bill is trying to plug that particular gap. What circumstances would trigger the advice that you talk about? If the chief education officer is asked, would he or she have the right to have some sort of statutory right of input? It would be just generally around informing the council that it is carrying out of its education functions. It would just be part of normal council business to seek advice from those within education in the way that they do at the moment and seek advice from those involved in social work and other areas of council business. What value is that actually adding? The view that has been taken is that it is important to have somebody within the council who has the qualification experience to provide that advice on the carrying out of education functions. Shouldn't councils already have that skill, these skills? As I said, in many cases they already do. I think that the point that was made to us, we have had a number of discussions with ADES about this, we are very supportive of this provision. The point that was made to us is that, as has happened in a number of authorities in recent times, they have tended to rationalise the number of senior managers they have. Directors of children's service, for example, are now quite common, as opposed to directors of education, that kind of thing. The intention is that education and advice around education issues is put on a similar footing to that of social work, to ensure that the council that has a qualified individual within the organisation who is able to provide advice on its education functions. Now, there has been no formal public consultation on this, although I know some stakeholders have been involved in, to express their opinion. What were the key issues that were raised in the discussions with stakeholders and why was there no public consultation? Again, like the attainment provision that we have already discussed, those provisions came up fairly late in the day, that is why there has not been full formal consultation on this point in time. Again, generally speaking, ADES is very supportive of the provisions, other stakeholders have generally been supportive of the introduction of this post. COSLA has advised us that they remain to be convinced of the need for this post. Now, there used to be the post of chief education officer, but it was abolished back in 1996. Have things—what's changed? I mean that this post was deemed unnecessary then. What's changed that it's necessary now? Right. I think that it's the two things that I refer to. I think that partly it's about the rationalisation of local authorities, given the funding constraints under which they're operating and the need to ensure that there is somebody within the council who has that education background. The second thing is the complicated landscape around educational legislation and related legislation as well, which we feel would benefit local authorities to have that professional advice within the council. I'm just a little concerned. I said before that you would expect councils already to have this level of expertise in connection with education. Does that imply that there are some councils that are falling short on that and that need this advice, that need this extra expertise? Certainly not that we're aware of, as I say. I think that the rationale behind it is to formalise that position within the council and to ensure that that advice is available in all occasions, both now and in the future. I'm slightly confused now because I think that you've said slightly contradictory things there. You've said that in response to two questions from column one that all this is doing is formalising the process of expertise that's already there, that's towards the end there. Earlier on in one of your answers you said to the question about whether expertise was there, you said that some authorities have it, which suggests that some don't. Which one is it? We're pretty certain that all authorities do have that expertise within the council. It is about formalising it and putting it on a statutory footing. You would view all the all-havit and just formalising the process. I share much of Colin's confusion about what we're seeking to achieve here. You suggested that many councils have it and then in response to the convener you suggested that all have it, but perhaps in a different guise. I think that I would have concerns that we appear to be legislating for something where there isn't a need and the consoling fact that the Association of Directors of Education won't a statutory requirement to have Directors of Education is going to surprise absolutely nobody, but we legislate where we need to rather than just because it makes us feel slightly comforted. I think from the responses that you've given to Colin and to the convener you've assured us that all local authorities take seriously this requirement. They may provide it in slightly different ways, but have access to that expertise already, and therefore why are we being asked to put on a statutory footing something that is being delivered already? I understand what you're saying. I've outlined the rationale behind the provisions being in the bill. I don't think I've got anything more to add to that. I'm sure that we'll come to the policy question when we have the cabinet secretary, so George, did you have a supplementary question? Chief Education Officer, again, are we not getting a wee bit caught up in structure here, because the whole idea is that the chief education officer, I understand what you're saying when you say that many of the departments and councils are now directors of children services, and there's a whole idea. Yes, expertise is there in local authorities, but it's the case of having someone who's so responsibility and is an expert in education, because not all that director of children services is not always someone from an educational background. Is that not the case that we're looking at when we're talking about the chief education? That's absolutely correct, and I think that that's part of the rationale behind making sure that there is a clearly identified individual who has those responsibilities within the council, be it that director of children services or somebody else. Okay, thank you very much for your attendance this morning. That was obviously our first run at the Education Scotland Bill. Before I close or suspend the meeting, I should have said at the start that today is the start of the SQA exams for pupils across Scotland. I know that pupils this morning have been sitting higher on drama and today will also be sitting higher economics. On behalf of the committee, I wish all pupils who are sitting exams today and over the next few weeks the best of luck learning exams. I want to abuse my position and say good luck to my daughter who's sitting on higher drama this morning. She's sitting in the exam at the moment, so she won't hear this until later. I'm sure that we all wish all pupils across Scotland the best of luck in this. It's always a stressful time for both her pupils, parents and teachers, so good luck to all of them. Can I suspend briefly? Moving on to agenda item 2 this morning, we are looking at educational attainment gap and particularly in the role of support and the arts. It's part of our work on educational attainment in school. We wanted to drill down a little bit in certain areas. Last week we looked at the construction industry this week, as I said, sport and the arts. In terms of raising attainment, we have talked about the attainment gap and closing the attainment gap. What the attainment gap means, so hopefully we'll get some more detail on that this morning and, of course, we want to focus not just on examination results but on attainment in its wider sense. It's fair to say that there is a limited academic literature on this particular area about the impact of sport, arts, etc. on the attainment of pupils, so I'm hoping that we'll have some practical examples today from our witnesses. I begin this session by welcoming Brian Caldwell and Stephen Gallacher from St Myrran football club. Donald Gillis, unfortunately, is unable to be with us this morning, so Chris Smith. Thank you, Chris, for stepping in later on from the SFA. Colin Thomson from the Scottish Rugby Union. Graham Main from Electric Theatre Workshop. Ruth Wishart, who is a broadcaster and journalist. Thank you all for coming along. I say to the two gentlemen from St Myrran football club. Given there's two from St Myrran football club, any questions that you wish to answer, I would ask that one person from St Myrran football club answers the question. I don't mean which one it is, but you're not getting two bites at the cherry. I'm sure that St Myrran fans would love to hear from you, but I'm thinking of one person in particular, but if just one of you answers, given the six people on the panel, we want to get through this as quickly as possible. I'm going to start this morning's questions from George Adam. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask these to have this session, mainly because I think that sport and the arts can contribute so much. One of the things that we're getting in our evidence at the moment is the fact that we're having difficulty engaging with hard-to-reach children and young people and hard-to-reach parents. We need to get both involved in order to get push education and attainment forward. I know from all your organisations that there's various work that we do on this. Can you give us some evidence of some of the young people and parents that you've met during your work that you've had positive outcomes in possibly going down the route of a career path or other parts of education? Obviously, I work with St Myrran football club, but I do a programme called Street Stuff, which is a partnership programme between St Myrran and Brownshire Council. The programme itself has started off as more to work with young people in more harder-to-reach areas to get them away from the so-called youth disorder and antisocial behaviour sort of background. As the programmes went on, probably six years down the line now, 48 per cent of the young people involved in our programme are staff members, so we've basically took the kids who've been dropping out of school, being causing trouble to become the member of staff to run the programme, but in turn it's helped to reduce youth disorder collectively around, but it's given them that positive outcome as well. But not only that, it's also given the parents that sort of feeling that the kids are doing well. Now they've got somewhere to go, they're not having to go, but they've not got a job. They see there's a positive place for them to go, so that's the programme that we're working away with at the moment. From your own perspective, you obviously sit among the park, and the new ground is actually in Fergusley park, which is an area that we constantly hear about as the biggest, largest area of deprivation in Scotland. Have you had quite a lot of involvement with the young people in that area to try and help? There's a few examples. Every Friday and Saturday night we've got probably 50, 60 kids turning up between six o'clock, 10 o'clock to turn up and play football on both nights, but just the other week there we managed to take 10 kids from that area in the first ever truck out of Fergusley park, and we took them for a week to London, and it was the whole culture thing change, you know, that it's that first time in a tube, first time out of the city, first time out of Paisley, you know, and the parents that the panic of them, oh no, what they're going to be like, but the kids to see down the street up close, you know, or these kind of things, it was like a, it was really, you know, it was an exciting time for us, but for the kids, the memory, you know, lashed on as well, but these kids are turning up at us every week, you know, coming to the football club, seeing that there's a, there's somewhere for them to go and something else to get involved in, which is probably something they've never had the chance to do, so it's using football again in my sport, should we say, to get involved in something positive. Because a lot of your clubs now, you do have, it's about 50, 50 with young men and women now, and you have dance classes and things like that as well, so that kind of crosses over the, you do sort of the culture side as well. There's a few, the dance part's really taken off, we've done an evaluation from UWS, they came in and they obviously spoke with the kids, and the kids were telling us what they wanted to do, so instead of us changing the programme, which we tend to do, we'll do the decisions that they want, the kids spoke, we want this, we want that, dance is one of the big things, so we've got a programme now where the girls are turning up more than the boys, so there's one in the venues, there's over 100 kids turning up on a Friday night, but 60 girls, 40 boys just to do dance, they still get the football part of it. That's coming along, it's been more successful, but we're trying to get more of the kids to take and lead the sessions, the way that they like to do it, under the watchful eye, obviously, that are the train coach. Can I ask the other groups with regards to the positive outcomes you've had in working with these types of hard-to-reach young people? Happy that. There's loads of evidence across the board. I think that the programme that I manage at the School of Football, we have in particular for myself at the south east region, I look after five schools, and all five schools in really difficult areas. Probably one of the most difficult at the moment is Craig Royce in high school, and we have a link there with Spartans Football Club, and a lot of the young boys and young girls who take part in our programme actually attend Spartans Football Club on a regular basis. They run a number of different programmes, whether it be a FUTI club on a Friday night, whether it be the young boys and girls going in there and working as ambassadors for the club for various different venues and various different events. That would be one first and foremost, and that's not really looking at what academic qualifications are going to achieve, but what they're going to do out with football first off. I'll be the first one. We've got several programmes throughout the country, mainly funded by cashback funding. We have 30 schools of rugby that are operating across the Lent and Breds of Scotland. We also run what was street rugby sessions, which have now morphed into referral programmes. We found that the street rugby sessions were in some cases a bit hit or miss. You had to take the word that the children were going to be there on that particular night. So what we've done is we've worked with the campus bobbies, we've worked with local social work, we've worked with the referral teams within schools and within education, and I circulated for the committee a paper on an example that we ran at Braveview High School and Craigie High School. That's typical. We've got 15 such of these programmes running, where it's children who are at risk of dropping out, who are referred to us by the guidance staff or indeed campus police. They go through a development programme where we use rugby to teach wider skills, so wider skills of teamwork, respect, engagement, communication and life lessons, and through that, similar to many other programmes that we've heard about, we've taken them on a journey to then qualification, working in rugby, playing continuing in rugby and continuing beyond that. From all the programmes that we've run, what we've found, experiences of young people and indeed adults around these young people, where they've been most successful is where we have had partnership approach between PE staff, school staff and delivery staff from rugby. A Scottish Rugby could give you lots of examples whereby Scottish Rugby has done this, but what I'm saying to this committee is that where you think PE pass, PE, physical activity and sport, that's when it has a maximum return. It's more sustainable because education is buying into it and the school is actually buying into it, and that usually comes from the head teachers. If we have a head teacher, for example if I think about Maxwelltown High School down in Dumfries, a very positive head teacher who's come and spoken at the Parliament here when we had our Scottish Rugby parliamentary reception, and she talks glowingly about the impact that the rugby programme has had on her children and her small community in a deprived area down in Dumfries. The impact for the children is huge, attendance, attainment goes up, achievement goes up, but also the drift into the local rugby club also goes up as well. Within the last three years we've taken that school from having one team to now having four or five teams. What I guess I would like to put over to the committee is that where you have good partnership working between a sports organisation or indeed an arts or other organisations with education it does work, but it has to work in a sustained way year in, year out rather than it being an initiative that stops when funding stops or an initiative that stops because the initiative that's being led moves on. Welcome to the answer. I know that Mary, you wanted a question, I think, on rugby. My question fits into the answer, Kate. Colin, am I right in saying that when you gave evidence to the health committee many years ago in pathways into sport that you spoke about physical literacy? Yes, I could have done. I think you might have done, and I feel that it perhaps fits in here, but it was just the Scottish Rugby paper, convener, that was the only question I wanted to ask. The things that I was very impressed about was, I don't want to read them out, but you know all the natural benefits of this project. The second thing I was really pleased about and we're looking at attainment here and people from disadvantaged areas and communities was your partnership with the High School of Dundee, because many of the schools in Dundee would focus on football rather than rugby. I just wonder if you'd say a word or two about that, but the one thing, convener, that I thought was missing from your excellent paper was there was no word about parents, and I just wonder, you know, when you've got kids, did you find parents got involved or were they supported? They're not mentioned at all and I just wonder how does this help bring parents into being more supportive towards their kids or whatever. So really on the partnership with Dundee High School, the physical literacy, because I think that's very important to what we're looking at and the parental involvement, and I would perhaps ask if the football side would respond to that. Okay, so physical literacy, I hope I don't contradict what I gave to a previous parliamentary section. This goes back to the sustainability element. Physical literacy, like anything, is sport, the arts, music. Many stone ago I was a PE teacher and one of my education philosophies was that if you have a reason for a child to go to school, educating them is pretty easy if they have a purpose. Now for many people, that purpose could be maths, it could be English, it could be arts, it could be drama, it could be sport. If you have a reason to go to school, then the other things become easier because you've got a purpose to go to school. If we go back to physical literacy, if you're teaching children from, just like you're teaching maths, English, there's a long-term approach to it. Very often within sport we have a short snap of activity that then tries to lead on to something else. If you do not have a physical literacy approach where you, just like English, you learn the A's, you learn the B's, you learn the C's and then you get up to an age where you're 15, 16 that you feel physically confident and competent to take part in whatever activity that may be. If you don't have that, you're never going to get it and so this is where the physical literacy and the longer-term sustained approach is very important. If you do that then children feel confident and competent to get enjoyed being part of things. It's basically being part of the community. From our experiences, do we have examples of parents getting involved? Yes, we do and all children have parents. Some parents want to be involved, some parents don't want to be involved, some parents just aren't there. What we have had examples of is parents taking children down to one example in Glenorthys rugby club. A child is exposed to street rugby, then gets taken down to Glenorthys rugby club. His dad says, oh, I want to go down and see what's happening at the rugby club. The rugby club welcomes him in and he then gets a coaching qualification and is now coaching at Glenorthys rugby club with the youth section and his son has gone on and played for the senior part of it. That's how it happens. The sense of community that sport can give, and in my case rugby, is huge. The physical literacy, the parental involvement and… We've heard that parents don't always get involved in their children's education, especially if they've had a bad experience themselves at schools. My question was whether it's football or rugby, is the involvement in a sport more likely to get the parents involved in their children's development? If I look at our clubs and indeed many of our schools, especially in the school sector, the teaching workforce is supplemented by parents that want to help. That's a natural by-product of it. What we are finding is that many of the adults who are now being involved have not experienced school sport themselves, so there's a huge education process that we have to do for that to get them qualified to help the teaching staff. We run a very extensive coach education programme that puts 4,500 people through coaching, and the majority of those will be parents. However, there is a large section of the community whose parents, quite frankly, don't care. We've got to make sure that we cater for them as well by quality coaches, and that's where we can put people in. Dundee High School is the rugby playing school in Dundee. However, we've been engaging with them around outreach programmes into wider communities to widen and broaden that base of rugby. We're having particular success at Harris at the other end, at the west end of the town, but we need to look at that at the moment and more in discussions with Dundee High School at the moment, because the development officer has just recently moved on from there, so we're appointing another one. That's part of the wider Dundee City piece that we want to do. I was just going to add a wee bit about one of the programmes that we've run recently that is engaging with the parents. Obviously, we're in Ferrisley Park, and football tends to be a male dominated sport. There was an issue in Ferrisley Park with parents bonding with their children and also being able to cook on a meal and a health on a budget. We've run a couple of times now. We called it Buddy Hell Kitchen, and we've got local fathers to come along at four o'clock after school who went into our hospitality suite and used the kitchen. We're taught how to cook a meal on a healthy meal on a budget, while the children were inside playing football or sport inside our air dome. That went on for an hour, and then the children came over for the second hour and spent the time with their dads eating the meal that their dad had prepared. That was a bit of bonding, helping the bonding. The children get health benefits, and the hook was that it was quite acceptable for a dad to come to the football stadium, whereas it might not have been if it was something, maybe a council kitchen or something else, a school kitchen. It wouldn't have been acceptable, whereas it became quite, shall I say, sexy to come to the football stadium for a father, and it was very successful. The question about outcomes is quite a difficult concept for us to really understand, and I acknowledge what you're saying, Stuart, about there probably not being enough work to show us what methods are most impactful. The biggest impact that we have, for young people, is making them feel involved in a community. We deliver a project at Maxwell High School, one of our key schools. We're there for six months embedded in the curriculum. We run it across all those schools in Dumfries, and the school partnership is vital to us really understanding the needs of the pupils, the needs of the community. We give them interdisciplinary learning across performance, but ultimately we're looking to get them involved in a major carnival. The carnival includes 4,000 people. To get them involved in that, I teach them theatre skills, design skills, acting skills, and it's how we do that. The impact for us is often not them excelling at a particular discipline. It's making those young people feel part of a wider community celebration and going back to your point about parental involvement. I think that if the model can work, we spend six months getting them involved and then we have a major celebration. We also have shows and events that perhaps for that community they couldn't really afford. We've got a task force that goes around and offers free tickets, but the relationship between the pupil and the parent is really important because often they'll tell us, because he's then that, then I'm quite interested in coming to see that show. So there's all sorts of different outcomes that happen. Can I just follow on as well what Colin has already mentioned about leadership in schools? It's come up quite a lot. If the headteacher isn't interested in engaging, we tend to not have a crossover of work. I'd like to ask the organisations involved. How do you feel? Could you do more work working with local schools or local authority? Do you have examples of it? Colin has already given us a couple of examples, but do we have examples where that's actually worked out? Would it be beneficial for you to get that access? Before I introduce that, Ruth, can I ask you to maybe give us your views on the original question about the activity of the arts and theatre sector and broadcasting? I suppose you've got much experience in that, in making pupils interested in getting involved in education. I'm actually here, convener, really as the chair of the strategic group for the creative learning plan, rather than in my professor of classes, a journalist. In a sense, we've been talking a bit about partnerships, but in order for the curriculum for excellence to work in the way it was structured, it has to concentrate on creativity in the sense that creativity has been knitted through all parts of the curriculum. It's not just about expressive arts important as those are. I'll leave with you what we produced. That involved a partnership with ourselves at Creative Scotland, the Scottish Development Network, Education Scotland, the GTCS, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, Skills Development Scotland, Associates of Directors of Education. In essence, we're all trying to get together and say, if we mean what we say, we've got to make sure that in all of our professional capacities we try and ensure that creativity is not just introduced to students but, importantly, is introduced as part of teaching practice. One of the nice things that's come out of all of this is that both the SQA and the GCCS have now got qualifications that are specifically about teachers imparting knowledge creatively or indulging with the students in creative activities. I know that you're interested in evidence of how this works so that it's not just mouth music. The portfolio manager for education and young people at Creative Scotland, I know, sent you a paper that has a number of bibliography attached, but I draw your attention in particular to a report that came out in an American report, but it's important because it's a long educational study. The report was called The Arts and Achievement and At-Rescue, which in essence often meant people from a deprived background. The results were really quite remarkable because almost half of the people from those areas went on to college or university, which was a kind of quantum leap in what you might have expected hitherto, but I'm just going back quickly to specific examples here. As you know, you all know about Sistema, of course, at Rapplock and Rowan in Govanhill. There's an Aspire project in Dundee again, which is working with nine schools, the most deprived areas there. We also use the cashback programme for creativity. That's helped us giving access to positive creative experiences for a lot of kids. The youth arts strategy, which was just published Time to Shine, I was interested in what you were saying about letting the young people decide the programme because I think that that's really, really important. We've created at Creative Scotland 11 youth arts hubs all over Scotland, and they are designed and run by the young people to their own agenda. Of course, the Government provides a lot of money every year for the youth music initiative, and I think that's really important because there's a huge body of evidence about how learning any kind of musical activity and instrument impacts on self-confidence and self-belief in classroom attainment levels. That gives us 40,000 kids every year, guaranteed years of music tuition up to primary six. There's loads of stuff going on, but from my own experience, if you wanted a specific experience, we've run several days where we've involved both the staff from schools and our friends in the arts sector, because there's a huge number of partnerships, as you know, between major arts organisations, including all our national companies, and schools working together. It's really quite exciting. One of the days that we had—I won't bow you with all of them—we had at the Science Centre because we wanted it to be a fairly sexy environment compared with a classroom. The day was recorded by very young schoolchildren on their own laptops, and they made cartoons of the day, they made films of the day, they made storybooks of the day, and it left us feeling, frankly, inadequate. However, it did show how we can use not just creativity per se, but creative means of teaching to enthuse young children and get them interested in subjects that might have appeared dull before. I'll go back now to George's question. Our programme is delivered at night time. Night time needs-based. How the whole programme works, we'll sit on a daily basis with a community safety team, work out where we should be, work with young people. We're at most at risk of how it works out. It's just street work all the way doing football activity. Small percentages we manage to get indoors. When we're on the street, we're finding the needs of young people, whether it be a social work case, a police case, whatever that is, we're past the relevant places. Now, there's a lot of times that we're finding kids below the ages of seven, eight years of age who have issues, you know, have problems, we've got to pass it on. We've asked on occasion, can we take the programme into the school? Now, us working away with community safety team, they deliver a programme within the school called a safe kid programme, which we deliver at the club. It's workshops, you know, on all these different parts. The kids come to us. Us trying to get into the schools, but we're met with a no. No, you can't get in. You're not part of what we would say is the council establishment. We're a street programme, we're a third party, we're on the outside, but we're working with 25,000 attendences every year. How we can get to the kids in the schools earlier for the job that we do, we could make a bigger impact, but we're met with a no. No, you can't get in because you have to be either part of your hub, you have to be part of this, you have to be part of that. We'll tell us how we do it so that we can get in because what we want to do is to do the job safely and efficiently where the kids is earliest possible that we can get so that they don't end up down the route of the older brothers or the older sisters they've done or the parents they've done over the years. We're trying to get it quicker and a lot earlier within the schools, but at the moment we're sort of met with a no, so we're trying to get around that. The good work that we've done in the schools in Dumfries and Galloway has taken us a time to build a reputation so that teaching staff know that that work is of good quality, but I echo what you're saying about trying to get access to the school. It really depends on the management, whether the management and that example, the head teacher, just really embraces any involvement with the school, but some of the little work that I do across Dumfries and Galloway is about merging the arts through our own hubs. The same thing keeps coming back to us in that when we're inside the schools, now we're there, they tell us we're dying for activities to do, but we just never hear about it. Meanwhile, back with the arts sector, with the artists, they're telling us we just can't get into the schools. We've been trying to combat that, and of course our region is quite weak, so we can get around it and try it, but we've been trying for a couple of years now to get access to the inset days that the teachers have, and they'll tell us no, there's no way you can do that, because that's dedicated for SQA time, which for us illustrates the potential that's there, but I think that if we were able to do some community development stuff with teachers on a time when the kids aren't there and bring partnerships together, I think it would be really advantageous for all sectors. One of the ways in, there are problems like that, which we've all been familiar with, but one of the ways into it is that 30, I think it is now of the 32 local authorities, are part of the creative learning networks, and the job of the person running the creative learning network in their area is to make marriages of convenience, so they know what the arts opportunities are out in their community, but they also have connections with the schools, so they're able, if you like, to broker the kind of relationships that sometimes it's difficult to do just from the outside, so I think that, and sorry, just quickly, there's another thing worth looking at, which is for all schools, which is a creativity portal which Creative Scotland has up, and it's been running now for quite a couple of years and means that teachers can access that and see for themselves what's available and what they might want to dip into or not, and it's really very useful, but there is resistance, and I understand the resistance because, you know, there's the tyranny of the timetable, you know, there's having to deliver aspects of the curriculum, and there's still, I think, quite a lot of teaching staff who are still slightly living in a silo rather than understanding that cross-fertilisation actually helps attainment in their subject as well. We are quite fortunate that all the headteachers that we work with, certainly the five that I've been working with closely over the last four or five years now, are really, really supportive of our programme. I think to teach leadership firstly at a young age, they have to be confident. The work that we do with the pupils, they've already come back and said that 95% of them, I think, in the last bit of research we conducted, said that they feel more confident, and in order to teach any pupil to become a leader, they have to have that from a very, very early age. So, even if it's little things like just putting your sessions, you're delivering with S1 and S2 pupils, you're just asking them to take ownership for part of the session, whether they'll be delivering a little part of it in terms of a warm-up, whether it'll be providing them with little tasks when you go on trips or you go on events, those are really, really early parts and early stages of development, and that's the key to leadership for us at that young age. When they then step in to start S4, 5 and 6, then we can start to engage in them with a little bit of coach education, and that's generally when we start to look at them working with the school football teams, and we might just be going running a team along with a senior member of staff or an employee football coach who can lead it, and they'll just be there as an assistant, and that's quite key for us, and that's why they're really, really early steps for us. I think for a real-life example, one of the schools that I currently work with, which is Newbatt High School in Midlodin, we have two or three pupils already at S1 who are volunteering with the local football developer, who's Keith Wright, on his holiday programmes in his Easter camps, so for a pupil at 11 and 12 years old to already be putting a hand up, asking them to go and contact the local football developer, then looking to go and engage with them and just act as an assistant coach. Now, they might not have enough of what to do there, they might be at the holiday camp, picking up cones and counting numbers, et cetera, et cetera, but still to go and do that at that age and to be given that level of responsibility, that's a really, really important life lesson for me, and then, leading from that, there's a number of pupils at Newbatt High School who, as part of the Sky Sports Living for Sport, they've been the ambassadors for the school now, and again, there's pupils who've come through the school football, so... Okay, thank you. I'm going to try and move on, because we'll get quite a lot... Yeah, okay. One more question. Basically, it probably covers both the arts and sport as well. We have, obviously, sports hubs and we have arts hubs as well. Is there not a case to be made that we could maybe more formalise them in a stage where they do have an engagement with education and attainment is part of their remit as well? Because, basically, you guys are the ones that the young people, the education they're finding difficult to reach, are the ones that they're coming to, so they're not a way like we could possibly use that one as an example have. The sport there is the hook, but you could be linked with UWS and the local college, West College Scotland, in order to get access to education should you get these young people and put them down that route. Is there not an argument to be made that we would join this all up and we start looking at these hubs and making them like arts hubs, all feeding into the education system as well? Okay, Brian Steele. Sorry, I'm only going back to experience here, speaking about the hubs, perhaps, in our area. We are not seen as a sports-based club, although we work for some unfitball club. The programme that we deliver is a model to engage young people to take them on, but if we speak to the people who actually run the hubs, they say, you have to go through all this criteria, but if we want to take that kid from the street to then get him fed into a hub, it's into a sports-based club, we've then got to ask that kid to pay x amount of money to join that establishment now. Working with the kids that we're working with in these areas, they can't afford that. At the times of poverty, we can't ask them to do that, so we've got to try and create something for ourselves to have something in the hope that maybe one day they'll accept us into these hubs, but again, it's like education. You either get in or you won't get in. It's the same as that. You either want you there or you don't want you there, so it's for the sake of the young people we're working with, we have to look at it a wee bit better. Having a bigger hub where everything is in one place, yes, it would be better, because then you can say, well, that's for maybe the kids, maybe they'll get the full package, but still get a touch of what they want to go with, and then the kids who are maybe the fliers, as we would say, can be maybe taken down the pathway within that whole structure. To me, it sounds a better idea. If I'm undersadden the question correctly, I think that the key thing for us are programmes S1 to S3, so if in order for us to try and take that where it links into colleges, universities, it's quite difficult at the moment. If the funding is there for us to run this programme through six years of high school, which in fairness a couple of schools have taken that on board, the Christchurch High School being one of them, that'd be fantastic for us. Can I use the Spartans idea as an example, where Spartans have looked over here in east coast, have made themselves almost like a community education hub to a certain degree, and that's what I'm talking about. There is, but again, the work that Spartans do is absolutely fantastic, but again, a lot of that comes down to the funding that they do externally and the sponsorship they manage today is to allow them to go and do that, to employ the staff to go and engage with that. I think, first and foremost, given the resources that we have, if across, certainly for our programme, the work we're doing this year with Dynamic Youth and Youth Achievement Scotland, that's massive for us. The pupils that come into our programme are going to achieve, we're going to have roughly 180 sessions a year, and S1 180 sessions a year in S2, but it's not a recognised subject for them. The schools recognise it as a subject, but they'll take part in it every day, five days a week for the S1 and S2, and potentially three, but for that you don't achieve anything up until this year, where we've started to engage with Dynamic Youth, so now all our S1 pupils are going through youth achievement, which now sits and is accredited by the S2A. For us, that's a key one, and as I said, we piloted it last year, and this is the first year that we've ran it across Scotland with all our S1s, and we should have. We're hoping to have around about 80 per cent of our pupils through some level of qualification from that. Ruth Davidson Very briefly, part of the building blocks of the creative learning plan are about going along the route that you're suggesting. It's about removing barriers, it's about making sure that arts organisations understand the need to get involved with education, part of that is the youth hubs. The youth hubs were set up, because they were set up relatively recently within the last year, they post date some of the previous demarcation lines that we've heard about some. I'm fairly confident that the links are there and are being built on. John Swinney I know that everybody wants in, but I'll come back to you first. I'm going to go to Chick first and we'll move on, but I'm sure that you can answer some of the points that have been raised earlier to the next answer. John Swinney Good morning. First of all, I will recognise the work that you're doing in both sports and the arts. That's south of Scotland MSP. I'm aware of the work that Graham and his team are doing. There is a dilemma, as far as I'm concerned. Sport is not one of the eight curriculum areas, but arts is. I can concentrate on sport if I may to begin with. How clear do you think it is that current sporting initiatives are leading to improvement in young people's engagement? With basic learning and school education, what evidence is there? John Swinney I don't think there's much evidence. John Swinney There's also another academy in Dundee, which is Morgan academy. John Swinney Yes, that's right, absolutely. If I can go back to your question, it's about sport specifically. Where we have to get to, there has been physical education, physical activity and sport are happening, in some cases, in isolation. Physical education is, correct me if I'm wrong, one of the compulsory elements of education within Scotland. John Swinney Yes, but it's confirmed that health and wellbeing... John Swinney Health and wellbeing is not identified as a separate individual, specifically in one of the curriculum areas. Arts is, but sport is inside health and wellbeing. John Swinney Within that, the Scottish Government recognises the positive impact through the health and wellbeing that physical education can have on learning. John Swinney I think that you've heard a lot of evidence today, through a lot of initiatives that are happening, that sport makes a difference to people's lives. You go and type it into any research database, you'll find it. Of course, there's a report in July on the impact that it has on attainment in England and Wales. There's many research studies being done within Scotland as well. I'll go back to John Pelichick, Tom Renfrew and the Linwood daily PE scheme, back in the early 1980s, whenever I was at college, taking part in it. So PE, physical activity and sport, under health and wellbeing, does make a difference. Where's the evidence? The evidence, as I say, is that you go back to the daily PE project in Renfrew in the early 1980s and have a look at raising attainment and attendance in attainment and behaviour within schools. You've heard anecdotal evidence today of schemes through football, through arts that do make a difference to young people's lives. I don't disagree with that. It has an impact. I'll come back to some things, particularly in arts, in a minute. It does have an impact, and hopefully a beneficial impact. I'm trying to relate that to basic learning and basic educational attainment. There's no real link, is there? I would disagree. There's a huge link, and yes, that might be anecdotal, but from my experience— There's no evidence of the benefits that that has. You ask any primary teacher the impact on her children, or his or her children, after they've had a runabout for an hour, and coming in and being able to sit down and get on with the academic study. The evidence is there. It is asked teachers—the problem is that we have teachers that are—I like the expression—the tyranny of the timetable. Maybe we need to step back from achieving higher, wider achievement and recognition that attainment is more than just academic success. For a lot of people it's about—the curriculum for excellence talks about it's a values-laden curriculum. There are many values in sport that correlate to the curriculum that we have to push forward—physically competent children that sport can do and the arts can do. We've talked about it this morning. Ruth Gaggart, because it seems absolutely clear to me that that's the case. Through the other end of the looking glass I feel like, if you look at it from employers' points of view and you look at what employers are saying currently they want in people and they want people who are good team players, they want people who are able to work collaboratively, they want people who are innovative and they want people who are confident, and all of these things both sport and the arts deliver in spades. The evidence is really—sorry, just forgive me, but I refer you again to—I'm not going to open up all the links, but the portfolio manager did send you a bunch of links, which gives you outcomes, chapter and verse of how the arts have improved. Speaking as a person with dogenies because of all these years playing hockey, I absolutely agree that sport delivers the same kind of values. I think like myself in terms of your sport at school and encouragement of parents to balance that with educational attainment has helped, at least in my opinion. But just going back to the expressive arts part of the curriculum, but if we look at the features that affect both sport and arts, I mean that we've talked about parental involvement, which is critical. We're looking also to narrow the attainment gap and look at those that are—we come from deprived areas. Of course, involved in the arts and in sport as a parental involvement, but there's also time, there's also finance, and there's also the danger of overarching expectations that can be created in these areas. I mean, how do we—do you think, coming back to my original question—we're actually achieving that balance in your opinion, and I'm not decrying the initiatives. I think they're great and it does involve more people. But, you know, coming back to the basic learning and narrowing the attainment gap, and given the features which impact both sports and arts, are we achieving the balance? Sorry, Colin. It's an interesting viewpoint there. I think that some of the things that frustrate me quite a lot when I go into schools, particularly secondary schools, is that they have the expressive arts curriculum and that split between music, art and drama, mostly some dance as well. But the frustrating thing is that you walk into the classrooms in a music room and there are 28 children sitting with headphones on learning individual music tuition, because the schools have defined that as, okay, well, you'll have to learn this to pass this course, but I think what's much more effective is when we use maybe community music models, where we're getting young people to come together and, you know, get away from the kind of classroom setting and just actually be expressive. If they're allowed to be expressive, I think that there's an opportunity that they can actually learn. For example, if over three classes we're going to create one piece of samba, that would take three classes to do that, but the skills that they learn in creating that piece of music, playing all different parts, are actually going back to what Ruth said. It's about discipline, it's about organisation, it's about understanding that you have to practice something to make it okay, but after those three sessions you can move on to something else. Difficulty is you go back at the classroom when they're still stuck on those keyboards, and what we're trying to do is try and energise that approach for teachers, and often what they tell us is that our presence in their schools is helping to inform their practice, and usually we go in and naturally we're an asset, and they say, can you do more? But of course we are restricted, but I definitely think we have to balance this idea that, and I'm not denying music tuition because music tuition is great, we've got some brilliant musicians, and I do think that we need to balance a little bit of individual treasure in terms of reaching our talent, but I would prefer that our cultural offering skills is much broader and much more about inclusion. One of the things that I would make is that there's a lot of evidence that teaching however creative the individual teacher is is missing a trick by not responding to the way that people learn now, and our children learn in a wholly different way from the way that my generation learned, and they learned through a whole series of different platforms and modules and so forth. So there's one thing stuck in my mind which might address your point about specific attainment. I lied to this, and it was written, if memory serves, by a chap called Derek Robertson, and he was talking about a class where there were a couple of kids with whom I have every sympathy who were completely bored by maths, and the teacher in question found that they were mildly addicted to guitar hero, which was not something that I have about my own laptop, but anyway he utilised their interest in that to fire up different mathematical strategies as a result of which they didn't become mathematical geniuses but they did pass their exams and I think there's a lot of areas where we need to listen to watch how children learn and respond to that and not try and force feed them information and material the way, you know, which is by and large yesterday's news. Okay, Colin and then Brian. I think we would go back to closing the training gap. It's what the question was, and if we look at the health and wellbeing curriculum, I think there are lots of great examples, you've heard some today, especially in sport, but I think what we've got to do goes back to the physical literacy, the long-term approach and the joined-up approach that has to be more common practice across more schools than it currently is, so there are lots of great initiatives going out there, there's lots of good progress in PE, there's lots of great progress in active schools, there's lots of great examples of how sport can link with education and where it works for the head teacher, it works, however, there are not enough, that should be the norm in every school and that's the challenge, is that we move good initiatives and good practice to make it common practice where we have leadership buying into it and so to answer your question do I think we are further down using these activities to reduce the training gap? No, I don't think we are because it doesn't happen as standard practice. Can I just talk a wee bit about the educational attainment? We actually run a programme that I've been on to the council about for a number of years now because I felt there was a real opportunity for the football club to run a programme for children who are leaving school at Christmas, who are winter leavers, the schools don't want them there, the pupils don't want to be there and they're a disruptive influence to the other pupils. We've started the last two years doing a programme where we're bringing these children to the football club, the hook of sport brings them there, we give them some football activity but on top of that we do CV building, we do interview techniques, we teach them first aid at work, we give them the qualification for that, we give them health and safety so that they get coaching certificates, so they're building a CV over the past two or three months on a day, two days a week coming to the football club. That only helps, these kids are probably the hard-to-reach ones that we're talking about here, who would potentially be leaving school at Christmas, wasting four or five months of their life and getting no qualifications, but they're actually coming out with some activities, something on their CV that makes them more job ready, which is a huge benefit to them. It's also a benefit to the schools because the children who are trying to attain educational qualifications are not disrupted by these children, who potentially are not really interested, so hopefully that can act as a springboard to help the ones who are left in school the five days a week to achieve better qualifications because they're not getting disrupted by other pupils who maybe aren't really interested because they're leaving school on Christmas. I think it's the hard-to-reach children that we need to look at here and how we can get a choose sport to bring them as the hook, to bring them and educate them and send them out of there so that they're potentially better off and job ready is the one for me. Okay, thank you. Liam. Thanks very much. It's partly picked up actually by Brian's last comment. I mean, I think we've heard both in terms of sport and arts that it has an intrinsic value, whether it's in terms of providing young folks with things to do, an opportunity to bond with fathers or parents, an opportunity to improve their learning across the curriculum in other ways, getting them ready to learn in other environments, but we've had a challenge in terms of parity of esteem in the way that academic and vocational qualifications are sometimes viewed. It strikes me that there's a challenge here in what we're talking about in raising attainment that we don't necessarily know how to value or give credit for what young people are achieving in the sorts of environments that you are involved in and that those initiatives are helping to open up. Are there examples that we can look at that give us a better handle on how we give due value and credit for the achievements, for the attainment that young people are succeeding in, whether it's in the arts or whether it's in sport and physical education? Can I start with Colin? I'm maybe going against the grain here, but I'm a big fan of the work of Carol Dweck, and anyone who's read her growth mindset book, where we should be focusing on the process, not the outcome. When you talk about attainment, we always talk about the outcome, be that a qualification, an outfall rather, that we focused on the process of, if we've got a curriculum for excellence and we know what that's trying to achieve, what is the process to achieve that? A lot of the softer skills that we talk about in the curriculum for excellence are about children being responsible, safe, healthy, achieving, nurtured, active, respected, responsible, included. They come through sport, they come through arts, they come through processes—Ruth is quite right—the innovative maths teacher that presents her subject in a different fashion. Those are the things that we need to be focusing on and then attainment will go up. I think that we need to strike a balance between the process and working on the process because I believe in Italy that every child has got the ability to develop, to reach certain standards if they're in the right opportunity, given the right set of circumstances, given the right process to help them learn. We should be focusing on the process and not necessarily on the outcome. I would just like to say that. Ruth Davidson I think that that's great. Briefly, to go back on that, because I think that sometimes what happens is that young children have got fabulous imaginations and sometimes it seems to me that some parts of some of their schooling squeezes that creativity out of them rather than nourishes it. However, we've got examples now, small examples of where the GT, CS and SQA are beginning to understand that sometimes out-of-school activities involve perhaps in environmental projects or in theatrical projects or whatever, that these can be utilised both for staff recognition, for staff qualifications and recognition for pupil attainment. I think that that's really quite important because learning is not about 904, it's holistically about everything that you expose a child to in their own environment. I'm interested in what you're making. It is counterintuitive, your argument, calling about process rather than outcomes. However, what Graham was saying earlier on about the ability to engage with teaching staff through and service days, seems to be being inhibited by almost a lack of value or an undervaluing of what it is that you and other groups are able to deliver through that as opposed to the stuff that SQA sets down and almost needs to be taken on as wrote and through continuous professional development needs to be kind of upgraded, that we need to take a slightly more nuanced approach to what that continuous professional development and development of teachers, professionalism and skills is all about. That's where I'm not sure we're capturing well enough what it is that you've all been talking about. There's clearly great examples going on across the board in Scotland and yet that attainment gap has remained stubbornly wide over successive administrations and successive initiatives. I'll just give you one sentence in response. I think there is lots of room for the SQA to listen at stage a bit more. That's not a good image that you're going to let, to be honest. Deleted. Take the message. I'll give the message though. I think that the point you're making, Liam, is very well made actually and sadly the only reports that we can really draw are written by Arts Council England, certainly for our sector, going back to 2000, which was basically trying to understand the value of inclusion. The problem is with the inclusion against it where you need to support attainment as it takes so long, it takes a life cycle for us to understand what the social asset impact is on that young person. Maybe we do need to think about partnership ways of measuring both in sports and arts culture and any activity, how that's actually impacting on people. I'll tell you this once though I walked into a school and it's very recently, and it's a school that has really low attainment. The head teacher welcomed me and my team and said, let's get one thing straight, we're not interested in attainment. That was quite an introduction to our team because basically what we were able to do there really quickly was stop suggesting, okay, we can support your drama students to get better exam results, we can support these guys, and what that did actually was mean that the enriching process that the young people got at that school during that six months was probably the best work that we've ever delivered because we were working on skills that could help young people and we were working with teaching staff asking them what are they learning in classrooms and how can we add to that. So it was this cycle that went on and I think when people are really honest about that and let us do our work like that, the other point I need to make is that most organisations that are here today probably have very low capacity in terms of it's probably 2.1 staff, if that, project staff and I don't think that the sector that are delivering the work actually have the resources to then go and measure that work and that's a big problem for our sector, we just don't have the capacity to do that. You can actually look at a couple of points. Firstly, when we're talking about achievement, I think, given the experience I've had in the last seven years working with young people, achievement means something completely different for every young person I've met. I sat in a meeting yesterday with a young boy who, achievement for him will be being in school still within the next six months because his behaviour within our programme within the school has been that poor, and that for him will be a massive achievement. We'll lose the chance to engage him when he steps out S2 or S3 because the programme doesn't continue beyond that, but for me that would be achievement, and I'm not even looking at attainment, I just want to make sure that that young boy stays in school because if he can do that, that provides him with a chance to go on and sit some form of qualification when he goes out in S4, S5 and S6, so you look at that from one aspect and I've got the other aspect, I've actually got pupils in the programme who are very, very intelligent, and then we look to use the programme to really try and just enthuse them to stay in school to make sure that attendance is really, really high, and then their achievement then becomes of what qualifications we can try and help them get. I think now that the schools are being banned in our programme, we're starting to now roll out S3 with a lot of the schools. It actually provides us now with a chance to shape how this S3 programme is going to look. If I think to the work that we're doing with Craig Royce and Ingressment in particular at the moment, they've both looked at S3 as opposed to just going in there and the people just playing football once a day. It's how we shape the linen during that period, so when they then step in S4 straight away they're ready to go and sit on national 4 or national 5 in PE. Now a lot of these pupils, boys and girls, are pupils who you wouldn't probably be looking at presenting them at that level, but the fact that we're getting to work with them at S3 and we can actually devise our programme, that might be something that I think in the long term for us might be a chance, might be a way in which we can kind of close that attainment gap, certainly the boys and girls we're working with. I'm going to have to stop you there because I've got a number of members who still want to get in times against us. Colin. I was quite interested in the evidence supplied by the SFA. Admittedly it seems to be mainly connected to the school of football, but there does seem to be a lot of assertions there about engagement of the young people as opposed to attainment. Is there any evidence that the evidence of engagement that's shown here in terms of football extends to other sports or to the arts? We always ask our pupils to go and engage with extracurricular clubs. I think that when a young boy or young girl is coming to high school in S1, yes, if they're involved in our programme, they're going to get football five days a week. But for us, for me, especially, they have to go and be involved in other sports. There has to be other aspects of their life because when they're that age that you're looking at that general broad education, you're looking for them to go and develop themselves as a person. I think that there's real life examples of that. I think that there's a young boy, Daniel, who was at Nubal High School, for example, who, after S1 and S2, has real passion for his music. When he's offered a chance to go to S3, he actually wanted to go and take music on board, so he stepped out of football completely with our full support. I know that he's now down at university and leads and doing a complete degree in music, so there's certainly a lot of cross-curricular work going on from our programme. I think that you're talking about anecdotal evidence here where you have knowledge of individual cases. Is there any body of statistics that have been gathered, figures, anything that would support the fact that young people are engaging more with learning and with school-based education in other sports and in the arts? To be honest, I'm probably the wrong man for that question. That's probably where my colleague Donald who should have been here would be far more versed to answer that. I can only really speak from the experience that I have, which is probably a wee bit more localised in working with the schools that I have, but I think that they do. I think that the engagement comes across a number of factors. I think that a lot of it leads from the staff that we put in place to the leading schools on a daily basis to make sure that they're going to work with the rest of the school staff to make sure that they are engaging in a number of other subjects. The cultural sector, Creif Sparks, is definitely Edinburgh-based, who are gathering evidence across most of our key venues in Scotland, and Creif Scotland supports that piece of work. It's looking at the behaviours of audiences. In some cases, there's been some evidence to show where active participation is happening, then there's a broader level of engagement to the art forms itself. For our own organisation, and I will provide evidence if need be, we've gone up to our fifth major celebration, and the work that we've done in the deprived communities of Dumfries has had an impact. Just by matching the postcode, we can see that the audience is now starting to buy tickets, and it's happening at a rate much quicker than we anticipated. That said, there's an awful lot of investment that we're doing in that community to achieve that. I think that what you're discussing there is evidence of participation in the arts, as opposed to evidence that, by participating in the arts, it leads to young people having better engagement with school education and with learning in general. I think that, at the risk of repeating myself, what's quite clear is that the young people who engage in the arts in school are, by virtue of the kind of skills that they're learning, are much more employable at the end of that. I think that maybe if we were to put the same question to the CBI or something like that, they would say that the end product, if you like, the young person who goes out of school and university will display enhanced qualities because of that. Graham mentioned earlier on that if we have a specific event like the festival of dangerous ideas or something like that, then it's easy to measure outcomes. On an on-going basis, there are very few organisations who have the resources in addition to what they're trying to deliver to try and do an in-depth study of impact as well. I think that everybody that you've listened to this morning, we've all spent a lot of time in a lot of places with a lot of young people and the experiences in my case have been uniformly positive and the reaction of the teachers to how these people have blossomed has been uniformly positive. I think that the problem is not that they're trying to find out if it works, the problem is trying to find a methodology of proving to you that it works. The difficulty for this committee is that we're always looking for evidence and without an improvement in engagement, we're not going to get an improvement in attainment. That's a simple fact. How can we measure this? I mean, where can it be measured? We all have this feeling that participation in sport, participation in the arts and so on is a good and positive thing. We all have anecdotal evidence that it seems to be a good thing, but we haven't got the hard facts. Of course, class is hard facts because of attendance records at school. It's part of it. Because if you get attendance records, it's certainly for our programme. Your average attendance in S1 and S2 is around about 92 per cent, whereas the average attendance for the school if it boasts it's around about 96, 97 per cent. In terms of engagement and making sure that the pupils that we work with are in school on a daily basis, that for me is the first and foremost part. That would be a fair bit of evidence of what I thought. I've just referred to your evidence where you say that the attendance in school is an average of 4 per cent higher for the school of football than none of the school of football pupils, which is significant, but it's not a huge figure, is it? Oh, I'd say that that's pretty big. I mean, 4 per cent when you're looking at the course of 180 days in the years, a fair number of days to miss school. I'm not a mathematician at all, but I think that we are a fairly high number. I think that again when you look at the individual cases, and that might start going down to the anecdotal evidence which I was talking about earlier, but when you look at some of the individual cases, we could have a total of 96, 97 per cent for the school of football, yet we might have two pupils out of 12 whose attendance is 60 per cent, 70 per cent, purely because their home life in the social environment is that poor. So then if you take that into consideration and we still yet have a 96, 97 per cent total, then I think that then paints us a bigger picture for it. I think that the measurement question is a very valid question. How do you measure those things, the impact of the environment, the school, the home, the intervention within arts, music, sport? It's a very difficult thing to measure, but I would welcome a research into this area because from anecdotal evidence, you hear it all the time, now we need to move the anecdotal into actual, well, this is what we're doing, this is the results, surely we can go round the schools that have recognised sport and music programmes and we can do a government research round about what are the benefits? Are the children that are in these cultures, in these environments, are they attaining more than others? Maybe that's a piece of research that needs to happen. I'm not sure if we're allowed to ask the committee members questions, but I would throw back at you, imagine what would happen, measure what would happen if those kinds of programmes weren't happening, because there are absolutely vital lifelines for a lot of young people. I spend a lot of time apart of Glasgow where you see kids being dropped off at Saturday morning music school and whatnot by parents who are really involved and really supportive and all of that, and they've got their violin case over their shoulder and whatnot. What we need to provide is for all the kids who don't have that supportive home environment or don't have the money to have all of those things, the youth music initiative and all of those programmes, the youth hubs, the sports clubs, all of those programmes, keep kids, I'm not going to see on the straight and narrow because that's ridiculous, but they do keep kids in a positive framework and that to me is at least as important as a piece of paper with an exam result on it. I don't doubt you're absolutely correct and I don't think anybody around this table would argue anything but the fact that sport and the arts do enhance the experience of pupils and turn out a better well-turned person. It's just back to the old thing, evidence. How do you produce a well-turned-out person? No evidence. How many of them? How many of them? The difficulty as well is that I don't know about your work but most of the young hard-to-reach young people that we work with have this kind of resurrection point, which is way after school and it could be with their 21-22 and they come back into the work that we do and they're ready. It's like they've matured but had it not been for the introduction that they had in second year or third year they wouldn't know that we exist. It's about making a very brief introduction to them at some point during their development that you can come back at some point if you have gone off the straight and narrow. It's whether we're actually focused to make sure that we have these community resources that are there to deliver that and I welcome the idea about a community hub and I wonder if it's maybe something that our future skills should be looking at in more detail. I just find it sometimes quite galling when we have these really high-profile art centres that are well-to-do areas but why don't we have that in some of our most deprived areas? It's obvious. George, a very quick supplement to follow on from what the column was saying. Is it not just the case that the west of Scotland cliche is that someone from a working-class background that's rock and roller football, you know that's always been the way out of poverty and is this not just a case of repackaging everything that's gone on before because that's why there's not much actual evidence as such because it's been going on for time and memorial from a point of view but it has worked in areas. It used to be the churches and uniformed youth organisations that did it but now it's been branded slightly different and we're actually aiming for to try and see if we can get either educational attainment or attainment just a career path in general because that was one of the things that was brought up last week by one of the building contracting companies was the fact that surveyors was that they talked about the career path of the person which wasn't necessarily academic you know it was to go down the idea of just either a trade or something else as well. Does anyone disagree with that? No. Well yes I disagree that we're repackaging an old song because you know it's a quite if you look at the some of the most successful companies there were just now the googles and the apples and all of these these are full of free creative thinkers they're not full of people with a batch of advanced hires. Brian, was it Brian Steven? The problem we are getting is faced with all the great education in schools but a lot of the kids that we are working with on the streets again back at night time is a lot of the kids have dropped out of school they don't have education they can't even spell to say Carole Dwyer you know people wouldn't even understand who this was let alone spell it but these kids you know they still need somewhere to go somebody to trust somebody to know they can open up to and that's been with them all the time you know working with them. I think the beauty again coming back into the football club or the sports industry is the club itself they've got a lot of links into the wider businesses so we're bringing in kids through work experience school based programmes linking them through sport and we do like photography classes that are picked side on match days so they're linking them in national media but then the businesses there we're asking these people for the kids to get a chance to go on who don't have the qualifications but known the trust of the links that they've made through the club they're taking that chance with the young people that they're never going to get going to the job centre you've not going to get on your CV the CVs are the same but you're trying to change it a wee bit to give them that experience which is real life experience and this is what the kids need but you're trying to use the sport side of it just to give them that you know and that's obviously the values that we're getting from it and the guys are getting the same. Mark Thanks, convener. I just want to ask a question about cashback and I'll cut across the programmes that most of the panel members operate under whether that's diversionary activities whether that's funding for sport facilities whether that's cashback for creativity and I wanted to ask the question in the context that we're under today about addressing the attainment gap, reducing inequality. The members of the panel think that the funding for cashback for communities is targeted properly. Do you think that with our renewed focus on tackling inequality those hardest to reach young men and women that cashback funding being spread over the whole of Scotland is actually the right approach or whether we should be focusing in the same areas that the Government is on the attainment fund? The position has never received cashback funding so I have any interesting question for us really despite the fact that we've actually applied but I'll leave that for another committee. There is something that you've said there that I'm slightly anxious about actually that the attainment challenge fund seems to replicate certainly for our sector what Creative Scotland is doing with the youth arts hubs. In fact, the living youth arts hubs are included in some of the areas that are included in the same fund and I bet again that some of those communities are benefiting from the cashback and I think we need to be very careful that we're not just seeing a league table in terms of poverty and saying that's where that exists because certainly for our community our young people are living, I feel, in an acute sense of poverty because they're often quite isolated, there's nothing round them for maybe 50 miles so I worry about that actually that we're just going for the target zones too too much. I don't think that we've got to be realistic about this. Creative Scotland gets £3 million for cashback for creativity over three years you know and in a pan-scotland context that's going to be spread pretty thinly. From myself, if funding based on the programme here to apply to local area committees to receive funding for the programme we had to run, only that there was a part by Scottish FFA this year we managed to receive some money through through Scottish FFA and cashback for the midnight league programme, a small part but again the amount of money that gets delivered through the whole of the country it doesn't go off a long way but it gives you a small part but the way it goes to me it should go locally and not nationally into these bodies because I think it would be better coming into the local area then it can be divided up better instead of going into the main ports and then let's see where it all goes for there to be fed out that way because I think it would hit the areas a wee bit better. Chris, did you want to go on? I think the money with the cashback first and foremost is vital for us it's I mean it's absolutely massive the funding that we get in terms of the inequalities in the areas that it's spent when we were provided with the funding we looked at the areas where we wanted to spend it and I think that if you look at the table the Scottish Model Index, the deprivation table, we have schools of football in the top 10 areas and that was one of our targets that we set ourselves and we looked at these areas that's where we need to get now. I think then when you're looking at how we spent it there with the school of football it is an S1 and S2 programme in the main. I have had a discussion with a headteacher recently about whether or not he thought that programme should change for his school and become an S4, 5 and 6 programme. The difficulty being that he then have missed the years of engagement with these young pupils and the difficult pupils that we were getting in from these difficult areas, making sure they stay in school till S4. If you don't engage with them S1, S2 and S3 then you lose that chance so I think we've identified the right areas in which in the right areas to work in terms of local authorities. I think we've identified the right areas at the moment for our programme and what we're seeing now is that the schools are now starting to see that and starting to try to match the investment from cashback with their own investment to make sure that programme can then continue in S4, 5 and 6. I know the programme again going back to what we do diversionally based, harder to reach areas, as the colleague is saying. Is it no then something again at looking at the partners within the area to say okay S1, S2, we're doing this, who's in the area that could do the same thing, that could work with these harder to reach kids, could then take that programme on S3, S4, because S5, S6, we're then looking to take these kids back into employment because the harder to reach kids are the ones that may be missing out, but if you're then working with them in the establishment within a partnership approach, it's going to be better for the young person and obviously collectively to make the programmes work a lot better, but again being faced with that challenge, no getting your foot in the door first, it's trying to get to that part. Sorry Colin. Cashback funding we have received and is gratefully received and it's against certain outcomes being set which we deliver against and external evaluation round about that. We focus the money back to communities and across 32 local authorities so we try to get the money down to where it is round about club development officers working with partner organisations to employ club development officers to put in place 30 schools of rugby and from that and diversion activities and from that we then use that money and money of our own as a multiplication to get further funds out of local authority and that's the partnership approach. As I go back to one of the points I made earlier, things generally work where you have strong partnerships in place and when you have leadership round about education especially to make it work and then you can bolt everything else on to that plan. Without cashback funding we wouldn't be in a lot of places. Okay. Again, going back to these other sports, again it's great to hear all these kind of things working but back to diversion based activities I've been on in a programme six years in the Renfrewshire area and I'm yet to be working at night time with all these other sports you know is it something that could be brought back into the streets at night to give these kids out with school another opportunity out with the education system to get back on the street for these kids who do not get the opportunity to go after school or be involved in these clubs who then don't want to be pushed in because they can't afford it. Give them something that's on street based that should be there but it's not getting a chance to do it because the funding's not getting put in to the places that's where it's needed for the kids on the street at night. Okay, thank you. Gordon. Can I say that I'm already convinced that sport and arts does have a positive effect on children's wellbeing and their education attainment whether it's about developing and reinforcing people's skills or making them more confident or improving their self-image. You know they can only have a positive effect on people's education but what I'm keen to understand particularly about the arts but also in sport in my own area in my own constituency I'm fortunate in that I have whale arts in western hills which do a fantastic job with the local community. I also have the big project who sang at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games from the broom house area both areas that I would describe as having challenges and what I would like to know is I've seen the benefits of these two projects in my areas what apart from finance what are the challenges you guys face in rolling out the provision that you currently have to other areas and what would you say was the soft skills that you help improve when you come into an area to young people? Again many many challenges that you'll face that I think one of the first thing ever when I went into an area was a case of who are you, why are you here, why are you coming to work with me. You know the kids that you've got to build trust up with them before they'll start to work with you start to open up and then realise what their backgrounds are and that are still things that is taking time but for every four years you move on as a new group it comes through and you've got to keep working away as far as you know you can throw money all day to programs to projects and it would never be enough it would never be enough to fix things but kids have to trust you believe in you understand that you're going to help them and if you've got a team of people that's prepared to do that every single night every day the week where they stand on the streets where they're going to be they'll come back at you and they'll change because we'll get proof that they are changing they are going into employment they are running programs they are taking charge so you have to still be there but they have to understand you that you believe in them because they're living a chaotic lifestyle that you know they're living the day today you know minute by minute you know so they want to know there's somebody actually cares for them first and foremost and then you start to get the best out of the kid so it's picking that person first we can pick a sports coach who's great at putting a drill out all day but you have to get the person who can understand the person understand the kid understand what they're going through and if you can understand what they're going through you'll make a difference to the life of that kid and you make a difference to the community and that's the most important thing as we say through sport sport sexy yes it's great you can get them involved in it but if you don't care about the kid the kid of the child you're never going to win you'll never make a difference we asked that same question in Dumfries and Galloway through our arts hub kind of process about you know what is what are the challenges that people are facing and something really interesting came up actually which was that specialists like youth arts people or youth development people they're actually a very specialist worker because they embody both the youth worker and the you know the artist or the leader in their field and they're quite hard to come by actually because they might they might have a good talent and can inspire and motivate young people to to achieve and to take part but it's it's for us often the best workers where we have qualified youth staff with us and that can be costly so suppose our sector responded by saying we need to have a more rounded development pathway for for us as practitioners so that when young people present you with problems that you're actually giving them the right advice and that you actually because you know when you mean I deliver face to face youth arts work in our company and always will some of the stuff that comes at you is not about the sport or the art it's about benefits it's about it's about my pals going through this and I think it's about as we have to make sure that the people that are only delivering this across our country are actually qualified going back to the skills that that they learn and I'm sure my colleagues will talk about their skills but the idea that to increase their creative thinking skills it's hugely important for us as a nation to develop that because you know when our parents were younger on dealing with some of you guys but you know you knew which job you were going into there was a pathway there was an apprenticeship most of the young people are what we know 25 to 30 have had about 10 or 12 jobs already even just being at uni so we really need to support our young people to be creative thinkers and to be flexible so that the jobs that come up when they're older they'll have that very important thing that they need which is create flexibility you know that they can actually adapt to those situations yeah I think I would say that the two things well three things but you need leadership you know leadership's absolutely crucial in a school or in a club or in anything you need leadership you need the kind of proper professional skills that that Graham's just flagged up to go into that but I mean I'll give you two examples where I think that there is and Dumfries and Galloway seems to be getting a lot of good publicity today but it happened that there was a an expressive arts teacher in Dumfries and Galloway who managed to persuade her heady to come off curriculum for a whole week obviously out with the pressurised run into the exams but the whole school was then able to do a project for that week and get it so everybody was involved and I think that's quite important too because just like with academic skills everybody's gifted but they're gifted in different ways and when Scottish screen was alive and before creative scotland came into being it did a project in five on filmmaking but it meant everybody all the kids whether they were sewing the costumes or whether they were making the scenery or whether they were behind a camera or whether they were acting everybody had a buy-in everybody was part of that project I'm sure you find that all the time Graham so we need enough people who have got the the skills to make that happen in schools and we need people in schools to be sufficiently receptive and sufficiently confident to come out of the tram lines because one of the things we found at creative scotland one of the shortfalls we've got at the moment are enough teachers with the confidence to teach creativity and to teach creatively and that's going to take time I mean it's not that old a curriculum Colin yeah I'm just echo all that's been said for me what I'm hearing is good old fashion teaching skills and good old fashion teachers the good ones were the ones that spent an awful lot of time with with children and they were the ones that usually got the result from children I'm sure you can all remember your own teachers they're generally the ones that spent went over and above and spent a lot of time what we've got to accept is in the modern world the chaotic world or the different challenges in this world is that where you can get teachers that are teaching beyond the curriculum and by mean by that mean the people the inspirational people that are working on the streets they're not might be teachers by by profession but they are absolutely teachers in the way that they go about their business and it's about people and developing people and getting people to spend time with children and make a difference to young people's lives and that's the biggest challenge is to get more people out there who can think creatively and also to open up the confines of education to be receptive to that and go back to my earlier point where that happens it works very well but it doesn't happen you have this silo mentality of things happening lots of good initiatives but it doesn't change culture and I think what we're looking at is a change of culture here okay thank you Chris I think in terms of the softer skills that we're touching on first and foremost but the big big role for us working with the the children at the edges that we're working at is teaching it would be confident first and foremost I think that's a skill in itself I think any child who has a level of confidence where they can stand up and speak in front of a group where they can speak to an adult and be polite and be respectful and speak to adult that is a massive skill I remember having a conversation with a university lecturer who was doing the interviews for pupils who were in their plan and it's not what they have on their CV they get some in that gets them in the interview but it's then having that confidence to speak having a passion to speak up with something they've been involved in and that for me is a massive soft skill the amount of time these pupils spend on a programme they understand their commitment I think that's something that seems to be disappearing very very quickly in society at the moment I've always been taught when you commit to something you commit to it you see that through at the moment certainly within football it seems to be you commit to something and it doesn't work quite work for you you step out of it and again that's something over the last kind of two or three years with our young pupils we're making sure that they're aware that when they step in the programme they're making a commitment for two years and there will be rough times in those two years there'll be challenges in those two years but they have to kind of see that through so those kind of softer skills for us are massive in terms of the challenges there's always a challenge when you step into a new school for the first time when you're telling a teacher when a teacher finds out that they might be losing some of the pupils for a period of week because they're now going to go and play football that is a challenge and that challenge is always met with ourself a chance for us to sit down and discuss what the impacts of our programme is the fact that when we look to our programme when they change to the critical for excellence we have to sit down and go through our programme and look at well what outcomes and expectations do we actually hit through the school of football and we have to sit down and show that and we have to put together a curriculum map to show that we actually hit these ease of nose across probably six or seven of the areas which is massive for us so that becomes a challenge but it's one that we've met and every time we seem to mash to turn everybody around the other challenge is engaging with the parents and that's huge and I think that's something I've really got a chance to touch on later on but the way in which we engage with parents is massive because the programme sits in areas of real deprivation getting those parents into school can be really quite tough so we need to look at ways in which we can do that so the first part is any pupil that comes in our programme they have to go through an interview process so you're then looking at a pupil at 11 years old p7 coming in with her parents to sit through an interview very very informed on an interview for a p7 but that first step is really quite important for us there'll then be an information that when the pupils are selected for the programme you'll engage with them through whether it's nutrition evenings during the year whether it's the school reports so we have a presence at every single reporter night in school so the parents again have a chance to meet with us so it's providing up to them with three or four different opportunities where we can get a chance to actually sit down with the parents and discuss how we think that our pupil's doing and how we think we can engage with that pupil to make them a little bit better. Okay thank you all for coming along this morning it's been a very interesting session and it's been very helpful in terms of our inquiry into educational attainment in its widest sense so clearly we've still got a lot of work to do on this and we'll be carrying on with our inquiry over the coming weeks and months but once again can I thank you very much for ticking the time to come along particularly Chris at the last minute so thank you very much for stepping in and can I suspend briefly. Okay we're moving on to item 3 on our agenda our next item is to receive an update from the Scottish Government on issues arising from the continuing care Scotland order 2015 and after care eligible needs of Scotland order 2015 we consider these affirmative instruments so I'm sure that committee members will remember our meeting on the 24th of March this year when the minister committed to providing further information so welcome back minister and can I welcome Fiona McLeod formally the acting minister for showing young people to the committee and also David Blair, head of Lutawther Children's Units Scottish Government. So welcome to you both this morning minister I believe you've got a statement you wish to make. A short statement compared to last time thank you convener good afternoon committee I offered to return to update the committee on two things firstly the draft guidance on parts 10 and 11 of the children and young people Scotland act and secondly to report on progress towards setting up the expert working group which will consider specific policies on aftercare and return to care and I'll be happy to take any questions after this brief statement. On the consultation on the draft guidance from January to April this year there has been a series of meetings, workshops and conferences involving local authorities, the third sector, practitioners, electric members and perhaps most importantly care experienced young people as we outlined to the committee in March. So far there have been 22 such events attended by about 250 people. These will continue over the next few months reaching a further 200 people. The workshops were jointly facilitated with the Scottish throughcare and aftercare forum for our next steps in producing the draft guidance will be incorporating feedback from these events and it's now almost complete so the next step is for both the draft guidance documents to be circulated to key stakeholders ahead of the next series of consultation events which begin on the 7th of May. The draft guidance will be accompanied by a set of companion questions to help to focus feedback specifically on the content and usefulness and we will of course invite and welcome written and verbal feedback on these as a crucial part of us all working together to inform the final phase of the guidance development. I hope that the committee feels reassured over the level of discussion and consultation that has been undertaken towards framing these documents and continues and in a way that makes them worthy, these documents will be worthy of more detailed targeted discussion during the next phase of the consultation. On the expert working group, I'm happy to confirm that we have sent out invitations. The working group will look at describing additional cohorts of young people who could be made eligible for aftercare under the ministerial powers in section 66 of the act in addition to the return to care commitment made by Aileen Campbell when the act was going through Parliament. I'm able to confirm that a wide range of key stakeholders including local authority children and family and housing teams, third sector organisations including the coalition members, Celsys, COSLA, the Scottish Throughcare and Aftercare Forum and Social Work Scotland have been invited to be members of the working group. Subject to diaries, availability and the capacity within those organisations, I hope that the working group will meet for the first time in May to agree the terms of reference and also the membership of a wider consultative group to support them in the work that they'll be doing. I'm asking the working group to support the Scottish Government in mapping the resource and operational requirements of any proposed extension to aftercare eligibility and to help us to describe a brand new policy on return to care. As you'll appreciate, we discussed in March that developing these policies will be a massive undertaking, as they require flexibility and consideration of capacity in the system, as well as the current financial climate. I will task the group with reporting to either myself or whoever is the minister by the end of this year, but I'll expect them to inform me if this is an unrealistic timetable given the enormity of the task that we're undertaking. The committee is aware that the timeframe that was already set out by Scottish ministers on 14 January last year was when we announced at the minister at the time a number of measures to support care leavers over the next 10 to 12 years. We will work with the group meeting hopefully in May, as I say. We will task them with trying to be able to set a framework and report by the end of the year, but I want them to tell me if that's unrealistic, but I must remind committee members that this is a plan that we want to put in place over the next 10 to 12 years. In conclusion, convener, I say again that I'm sure that we're all aiming for the same positive outcomes for our care leavers. I look forward to continued productive collaborative working on those issues with the stakeholders, with the young people and with the committee. Thank you very much minister for that update. Clearly, the committee had some concerns on 24 March with some of the evidence that we received and also some of the comments that we received from outside organisations, particularly the coalition, members of the coalition for continuing care. I'm going to ask members now what questions they wish to ask when we're beginning with Liam McArthur. You referred towards the end of your opening comments to the fact that you would want the members of the working group to advise you probably in the early course if they felt that the timeframe that they were being asked to work to was unrealistic. You'll recall from our previous exchange that there were concerns there that in terms of the local authorities it's clear that they have put up some objections or some obstacles they believe exist to delivering what we thought as a committee and as a Parliament we'd help to put in place in terms of the passage of the original act. Can you be a bit clearer about what the hurdle is that those suggesting that the timeframe being proposed is unrealistic would have to get over? If you were to be persuaded that putting in place are coming forward with firm proposals for extending the coverage of those provisions by the end of the year, it's not to be achieved. I'm not aware of anybody saying that the timescale is unrealistic. I'm just very aware of the huge task that we're going to ask the working group to take on. I think that I just wanted to put a marker down now that I don't want to say to the working group that you must have completed everything by the end of the year if in trying to meet a timetable of the end of the year they don't take the time and the care to make sure that this is realistic and it's deliverable and that everybody has the capacity to do what we want to do and also remember that this is within the timeframe of extending eligibility over a 10 to 12-year period as the Minister and Parliament accepted last year. I think that we'd all accept the getting it right rather than necessarily getting done by a particular deadline is always going to be more important but I think that we recognise that we have different opinions within that working group and therefore what I wouldn't want to see is the message from yourself as Minister from the Government to that working group that you anticipate the timetable being very stretching and what you're asking possibly undeliverable by the end of the year and therefore for those who would quite happily put this off for a bit longer feeling emboldened to make that case while there'll be those in the group who are very keen to keep everybody's feet to the fire in terms of delivering that extension of eligibility. That is not the message I'm sending out and a few you know I listed all the different organisations that are going to be part of this working group it's a very balanced group you know which nobody will have it will work as a group that's what I really want to see. Yeah I think the other question I had I mean obviously during the exchanges last time round there was reference made to the non-stratuary guidance which came as something that's a surprise that this had not been shared by with members of the the coalition at that stage and I think there was an undertaking given by yourself at that committee meeting at the end of end of March that this would be remedied and rectified as a matter of urgency so I was slightly confused and a bit concerned to note Mark Ballard's email to committee members last night that while welcoming the establishment of the working group and the invitation to themselves among others to form part of it he goes on to say we hope that the first meeting of the of this group will also give us an opportunity to view and discuss the non-stratuary guidance that was also mentioned by the minister at the education and culture committee meeting on the 24th of March. I have to say I'd rather assume that following our exchange on the 24th of March that that non-stratuary guidance would have been passed on to members of the coalition and others within the week certainly before the end of that that month and that clearly doesn't appear to be the case. I think that we seem to be conflating the two issues here. The draft guidance there has been since January of this year there's been 22 events covering workshops, conferences, one-to-ones with organisations, 22 events from January to April, the next one will be on the 7th of May each of those events has been part of the process of producing the draft guidance so it's live guidance you know it's an iterative process and for the next meeting on the 7th of May the latest iteration of the draft guidance will be going out to everybody. It appears as if that guidance and my recollection was that the first iteration of it, the first draft of it was produced around September last year maybe wrong but it was around that time. Yet Mark Ballard on behalf of the coalition appears to be suggesting that they're looking forward to an opportunity to view and discuss the non-statuary guidance that was mentioned by the minister of the meeting. Now that to me suggests that while they may be part of the iterative process they clearly haven't been presented with the latest iteration of it during the course of those many meetings which what she suggests have taken place. 22 events over a couple of months and every time the the you know all all that we're learning at each event is fed in so the latest iteration of the draft guidance will go out to everybody that's going to the 7th of May meeting and that is still being worked on even up to this weekend when I was yet again going through it reading it asking questions making my comments on it so this really is a live process so everybody's been involved all the way along the line I mean I'm trying if I can quickly scan this I'm looking at dates in March I'm looking at dates in April and and on as I say you know working towards the next meeting on the 7th of May with this. So what you're saying is that at those meetings the latest iteration of the guidance will have been presented to those participating so that they can comment, feed in and suggest where amendments need to be made. So the next meeting will not be it will not be the first time that they have seen that they're after non-statutory guidance that was referred to in the meeting on the 24th of March. I mean as I said what we're doing is every time we have these meetings it comes back and then we can send it out again not necessarily the full draft guidance but another list of the latest meetings have raised questions, have thought of other ideas, can we put these in the mix for the next meeting but I know that for the 7th of May they are going to get you know after all this four months of work and all the questions come back feed in more questions we've been getting celsus to go through this that right celsus have been going through the feedback from each of the meetings to inform the questions we ask at the next meeting but on the 7th of May they will get the latest iteration of all the many pages of the draft guidance beforehand. Apologies for labour in this point but just to be clear that it's not just that they've been informed of the issues that have been raised by themselves and other stakeholders at these meetings that at those meetings they have been provided with or since the 24th of March they've been provided with a copy of the latest consolidated non-statuary guidance in a single form even if they're made aware that this is obviously not a final version that that will be subject to the consideration of the working group in due course. No, what I was looking at over the weekend is the final many page version of the draft guidance that they will get out for the 7th of May what we've done for each of the meetings has not been produced the document each time but is to set the questions to feed into what goes into the final. I have to say I find that slightly disappointing. I mean it's certainly my expectation from that meeting at the end of March was that the non-statuary guidance that had been produced as I say around about September last year would be presented to not just a coalition but probably other stakeholders as well and that that would then inform their input into those discussions and meetings which are very much welcome having taken place but to some extent you're asking a series of questions of people who haven't had the benefit of seeing where the guidance stands at this point even if the expectation is that it may change radically it may not change greatly before it's finally agreed and I think that's against the spirit of what I understood was the undertaking given by you minister when you appeared before us in March the 22 events that I talked about that have been held between January and March that timetable was already in place and had begun it had started in January it had continued throughout February throughout March and then into April at there's no point at that when you're in an iterative process where you are at every meeting you've got the practitioners there you've got the providing authorities there you've got everybody there at different meetings there's no point where you can produce a whole set and say this is what all the meetings have decided what you're doing throughout that process is saying these are the questions that the meetings are raising leading towards what I was looking at over the weekend which is here is the draft guidance based on what we have been working on over now six months more than six months and that's what we'll look at on the 7th of May but unless they've seen sight of where that guidance stands at any one time yes they'll be able to respond to the questions they ask but as you know yourself minister I mean you can only question the information that is in front of you you can't question the information that's not in front of you and it is only by looking at the non-statuary guidance as it stands even if it's in its draft form that you can answer the questions that have been asked of you but also comment on those things that may for whatever reason not be being asked of you but on which you have perhaps very strong views but when the invites go out to each of the meetings it's clear what you're coming to the meeting for so that you've got the opportunity to learn from what has gone at previous meetings to think about what you think about it to feed that in so that your input into that meeting on that particular date feeds forward into the next meetings the point of the way that we're doing this and it's very much based on the way that we've done others in the run-up to the children and young peoples act the way that we went out and consulted with as many people as possible involved as many people as possible and that you know my understanding from the back benches was that the children and young peoples act in the way that it came to parliament was one of the best examples of working with all stakeholders as much as possible to inform what we finally printed to actually produce as the bill and that has been what we've done in this process as well it's also very much part of the whole process of how you know we do the guidelines that we're producing now are based on experience that we've got and guidelines that we've got going back many years so this isn't all sort of in a vacuum this is all part of very much a live process that has now been working for many years where everybody comes together works together and feeds forward constantly but you'll be aware that when we were discussing this last time round that actually what the act said and what the what was being proposed and in fact what was then passed in the standing orders were not seen in alignment so actually seeing the detail of what these non statutory what this non statutory guidance says is vitally important yes the process leading up to the the introduction of the bill and the consideration of of that bill was seen as fairly exemplary but there were opportunities for us in consultation with the coalition and others to make amendments make changes and all the rest of it but we had the text in front of us and we were able to to comment not on just the things that the ministers wanted our views on but on any issues that we thought were relevant and what I can't understand is how you can have this consultation process going on the meetings I'm sure are very valuable but you'll only get answers to the questions you ask rather than comments from the stakeholders on the breadth of issues that may arise through the through the non statutory guidance unless they have a copy of the consolidated I don't think that's an accurate representation of what's happening you know because the guidance that we're working on is working from a history of guidance in this area so when the sectors come together at all these 22 odd events they are coming very informed about what they want to see the guidance becoming they're coming informed they know they're coming from I've already used the guidance for a lot of support for these caregivers as we have already which they were you had been part of producing I'm not going to apologise convener for the way we've done this process I think this process has been one that has really involved everybody all stakeholders has given them every opportunity possible I was out at who cares Scotland last week and none of these concerns were raised by me what we had was a very strong discussion about where we can go forward based on their experience of where we've been where we are and where we want to get I think to be fair minister you were quite accurate in terms of the the process that led up to the bill I mean that's I think that was a and everybody in this committee I think and others outside parliament felt that the problem I think we faced as a committee was that the evidence that we received from your officials was somewhat confusing shall we say on the 24th of march and that's left us with certain some doubts and I'm still and I would like some clarity you talk about a process that started in January and is ongoing your official and the 24th of march said it's been on going since last autumn and it would conclude by the end of April it's obviously not going to happen now I presume and you said that everybody's been involved and there's been all these meetings the organizations that Liam and others have referred to on the 24th of march took quite a different view about their involvement or lack of involvement and so I think the concerns that the committee expressed on the 24th of march led it was led by the confusion that I think was established in the minds of the committee members by your officials to be absolutely blunt about it and that left us with some you know questions about why organisations hadn't been involved why they'd been a consultation and they hadn't been included what was going on with his non-statuary guidance etc all of that stuff was was I think effectively why we asked you to come and gives an update to try and clear up some of these questions so it's entirely reasonable that we try and nail down some of the the questions that were erased by the evidence on that date and can we be clear then the consultation that you're talking about starting in January and ongoing at the moment is that different from the consultation that your official carline uni was talking about that started last autumn or is that the same consultation it's in phases so phase one from october to december 24 was the public consultation on the draft orders that we looked at and passed last when I was last here in march and the consultation on that fed into and what we learned from that fed into phase two which was the january 2 april 22 events I'm quite happy I've got a whole list of all the events and who was at it I'm quite happy to send a copy of that to the committee if that would reassure you that when I say it was 22 events with 250 people we absolutely believe you we're just trying to clarify because there was some confusion on the 24th of march thank you for that may this come can I just say I share the concerns of the convener and Liam McArthur but just two fairly short questions you've said several times today that you've had 22 events that's between january and today so pretty well an average of five a month now I would have thought that you would be making considerable progress but in your opening statement you talk about more detailed targeted discussions and you talk about the enormity of the task and I actually thought that we're making some progress in coming to some agreement and then that was followed when you said you were report by the end of the year and I think you used the word maybe unrealistic so my questions are you also mentioned the implementation over 10 or 12 years so first of all what are the main problems I mean why there must be a few stumbling blocks here why is it that you've got 22 events you know every man and his dog involved in this area attending these events and you're coming forward with different questions feeding into this and phase one and phase two and phase three so what's the main stumbling block why is it going to take till the end of the year or maybe even longer so my questions are what can we expect by the end of the year will it is it possible that it could even be extended beyond the next election when this committee would have totally changed I certainly won't be here and what are the stumbling blocks because obviously no member of this committee is party to the discussions but I think it's fair although I wasn't on the committee taking the evidence in the children's bell it was my colleague Liz Smith but what's the big problem and what's the reason for confusion between officials and the government and why is it you've got 22 events and a whole load more planned what what's the stumbling block what is it that can't be agreed on right we're conflating two different things here it's the guidance that we've had 22 events on in 200 odd people the end of the year is a target that we've set for the expert working group now the guidance is about guidance on implementing the statutory instruments that we passed at committee and in parliament in march the expert working group is at looking at can we extend continuing care and aftercare to an extra cohorts of care leavers two completely different things so what's the problems why can't why do you need so many further meetings and delays no no it's two things we're working on the draft guidance to support the statutory instruments that we passed that's what the 22 events have been about and which we will continue to work on so that we get the guidance to support the statutory instruments for continuing care and aftercare for the for young people who are in care but can continue to be in care from their 16th birthday onwards and perhaps be eligible up to their 26th birthday that's the guidance to go with the statutory instruments the expert working group which we're hoping will be able to come back with at least you know affirm ideas by the end of the year if that's realistic that expert working group is going to be looking at extending continuing care to extra cohorts of young people not just those that we've already agreed who will get continuing care and aftercare after their 16th birthday so it's two completely different issues so is the end of the year realistic is that when well that's why i said in my statement i hope that that's realistic but i don't want to put pressure on an expert working group to come forward with ideas of which extra cohorts of young people we could extend continuing care and aftercare to i don't want them to come back with that unless it's realistic that there is the capacity in the sector to do it that in this financial climate that we can do it and that it will fit in within the commitment that the minister gave over a year ago that this is a 10 to 12 year process of actually extending the cohorts okay um i don't think there are any further questions minister so um can i thank you very much for coming along this morning giving us the update i no doubt we will follow this process with interest um but can i thank you once again for your commitment to come back to the committee and keep us informed and for coming along this morning thank you very much thank you and with that can i close the meeting