Chamber and committees

Back in 2018, when Mr Swinney was Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, we had a joint agreement with COSLA. Since then, we have taken a number of actions in relation to the empowerment agenda. I think that the committee took evidence on that from SLS, which understandably had an interest, given its membership. We have the headteachers charter, which looks at setting out how we could deliver a more empowered system. We have empowerment guidance for school leaders and staff. Ms Thomson, you also spoke about the importance of other members who support school education, and we need to be cognisant of the role of parents and the wider community in that.

The driving of the empowerment agenda is contingent on local authorities. In my experience, they can curtail that empowerment agenda, and I think that the committee might have heard evidence to that end.

The status quo will not cut it. Mr Rennie knows the PISA scores, and I have been up-front about our approach in responding to the challenge in relation to maths education, for example. There is a challenge right now in relation to languages education, too, and I am sure that we will come on to talk about it.

We need to look again at some of the courses that are delivered. That is not about the status quo; it is about the role of knowledge within curriculum for excellence. We heard a critique about that at the end of term, and I am sure that we will come on to discuss that in a bit more detail. We need to fundamentally consider some of the course content in relation to the delivery of CFE in the BGE to ensure that the curriculum is fit for purpose in the modern age and to update and refresh some of it.

On the maths curriculum, I have spoken to maths specialists—I confess that I am not one—and have heard that there is a certain way in which our young people require to be taught maths to build their learning. That needs to be better supported across the system.

Mr Rennie will not hear the status quo from me. I will come to the Parliament with a plan for the action that I intend to take. I am extremely mindful that there is lots of flux in the system just now in connection with the expectation stemming from the various reports. I was not the cabinet secretary during lockdown, nor during what happened with the SQA, but at that moment in time there was an anger in the system, as I still hear from teachers, around the SQA—and Government, to be fair—during the examinations period, with real frustration.

When I was appointed, I was told that there was a real appetite for radical change in the system, but I would gently suggest to the committee that, if you engage with secondary teachers, particularly those who teach S4 and up, you will find that the degree of appetite for radical reform is not as present as it might have been in the system in 2021.

That it is my understanding of the way in which we will administer the fund.

In answer to Ms Duncan-Glancy’s question, I said that I would look at the merits of every local authority’s position in detail.

As I understand it, that reduction relates to a demand-led budget line in the main. It is to do with initial teacher education places that were not filled—there was an oversupply of places this year. That calculation is set out by the SFC, I think. That is where that reduction has come from, so there should not be an adverse impact in that regard. Those places were simply not filled.

That showed that most pupils were enjoying being back at school and the stability that it brought, which was heartening to see.

We want our young people to enjoy coming to school, and we do not want them to be anxious about going out into the world without those supports. It is a responsibility for all of us. Teachers should—and do—support their young people in relation to their wellbeing, but, more broadly, we need to consider anxiety in our response to changes to behaviour and how we can offer better support.

I do not know whether Clare wants to say more on that.

Do you mean the current model?

He did bring a spreadsheet. I think that he was a friend of Iain Gray, so I was suspicious of him. [Laughter.] Anyway, I will set that aside.

At that point in 2018-19, we already had the evidence that talked about the number of subjects reducing in S4, the counter-argument to which would be that we now have a broader curriculum up to the end of S3. I will go back to the point that I made to Willie Rennie, who asked me what was wrong with Scottish education. Nothing is wrong with it, and we have a strong education system, but we did not fix the break between the BGE and the senior phase. That is part of the challenge in relation to course choice, because it is about practical delivery. Therefore, in my response to Professor Hayward’s review, I am thinking very carefully about how that will work in schools.

When Ms Maguire and I were at school, pupils would sit maybe seven or eight standard grades. In some schools, pupils would sit nine, but, across the country, the number was in the region of seven or eight. Now, you could walk into a school down the road and pupils might be sitting for five qualifications, but another school might have adhered to the traditional two-plus-two-plus-two model and not have moved much away from the theory of thinking about the curriculum, because that school wants to stick to the point, which Ms Maguire made, about performativity and believes that that is the best way to deliver results for our young people. There is a challenge in that, which goes back to the points that I made about whether we have a prescriptive curriculum with regard to entitlements.

However, I think that part of the response to curriculum changes and updating and responding to some of the curriculum improvement cycle work has to address the gap between the BGE and the senior phase. If I can be really niche-orientated, given that I had to write a timetable in a previous life, the hours that the SQA currently ascribes to national qualifications mean that schools cannot timetable more than—I think, but Mr Greer will keep me right—five subjects in S4 unless they start the delivery of the national qualifications in S3, which breaks the BGE. We need to have an answer to that.

Most schools start to deliver their national qualification subjects a bit earlier, in S3, to account for the delivery associated with the qualification. However, our new qualifications organisation must talk to the folk who write timetables in schools. In the past, there has been a disconnect—never the two shall meet. We need to think about the practicalities. If we unpick the qualifications, those are the things to which teachers will be responding. On Ms Maguire’s point about S4 entries, that is how we try to provide a bit more equality across the provision. That relates to Professor Hayward’s challenge around entitlements.

Through reform, there is the opportunity to fix some of the challenges in the system without necessarily unpicking all of it. That will involve fixing where we get to between the broad general education and the implementation of the senior phase. There are lots of ways in which we can avoid the two-term dash, as it is often referred to. We can deliver qualifications across two years, as many schools already do because they think that that delivers better outcomes for their young people. That will move us away from a system that involves three years of exams. As the committee will know, because it will have taken evidence on this, we like a test in Scotland. There is an argument that we need to broaden what constitutes assessment and how we measure outcomes for young people.

I am not sighted on the specifics of the City of Edinburgh Council. I think that the committee took evidence from Peter Bain of School Leaders Scotland on that, and SLS has previously raised with me the devolved school management challenge. I will take a look at the specifics in relation to the City of Edinburgh Council. The convener and I are having a meeting on a separate issue so, in that meeting, we could perhaps update her on any engagement that officials have had with Edinburgh council.

I should say that that is not my local paper.