Chamber and committees

It seems daft that a group of young people who were, by definition, some of the hardest to reach and engage with had—in an entirely unplanned way—finally been engaged with. It would be more than frustrating for us to lose that progress.

My main line of questioning, which is on children’s rights, is directed primarily at Bruce Adamson, but I would definitely be interested to hear the thoughts of Stephen McGhee and Linda O’Neill as well. Recently, there were issues with the Scottish Qualifications Authority’s relative lack of familiarity with equality impact assessments, children and young people’s rights and wellbeing impact assessments, et cetera. That largely predated the pandemic. During the pandemic, thanks to interventions from your office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the SQA has made a lot of progress.

I am interested in your reflections on local authorities as we went into the pandemic, right at the start, as things had to change rapidly. Did they demonstrate that they had a pre-existing level of familiarity with equality impact assessment and children and young people’s rights impact assessment processes, or was it the opposite? Was there consistency across the country? Did some local authorities demonstrate that that was already embedded in their practice?

Stephen or Linda, do you have any thoughts on the normalisation of impact assessment and the culture of children’s rights in local authorities?

Sally Cavers, is the experience of the families that you work with similar?

If Ramon Hutchingson is looking to come in, I will be very happy to hear his thoughts.

Before Stephen McGhee or Linda O’Neill comes in, if they wish to, I note that I take on board Michael Marra’s point that looking back is useful but looking forward is more important. Some local authorities have made significant improvements, partly because of the additional scrutiny of their practices that the pandemic provided. From what you have seen so far, have local authorities taken the approach of permanently embedding those processes into what they do or are we in danger of it being a one-off experience—that Covid required an additional level of impact assessment and we will go back to the way in which we did things before? Have we normalised that approach or does the culture in local authorities mean that it is all seen as pandemic related and so not required to continue in normal work?

I have another line of questioning, but I would first like to stick with the issue of attendance.

Bruce, at the start, you mentioned the group of young people who had been disengaged from school before the pandemic but who found remote learning quite beneficial, as it provided them with a route back in. We know that, overwhelmingly, the pandemic has thrown up barriers rather than taking them down, but in that case, it has done the opposite.

Have you had any discussions with young people in that situation recently—in other words, since August, when schools moved back to the default of in-person learning? Has the progress that was made with that specific cohort been undone by what has happened as we have returned to normality, or has some of that progress been maintained?

In your conclusion, you mention the potential need to move away from the SQA’s relatively demanding quality assurance processes if we were to move towards a system that had less external assessment. There is a strong cultural attachment to external assessment and verification. Will you expand on why it is not necessarily essential? If we compare that cultural attachment in Scotland to the position in other systems, does it ultimately come back to trust in teachers being perceived differently elsewhere and to trust in the system or are there other cultural factors that we would need to work on in Scotland if we were to move away from our current system of external assessment and verification?

Part of the issue is that, if we move away from exams towards some form of continuous assessment, there is likely to be an additional workload for teachers in that system. There are other opportunities in our education system to reduce teacher workload, such as changes that we can make to curriculum for excellence, if workload increases through continuous assessment.

My impression, from speaking to a lot of teachers in recent years, is that they are inclined towards a system of continuous assessment. They see the advantages of it, but the personal workload burden holds them back from adopting a system that they otherwise understand a lot of the attractions of.

I would like to return to the issue of equity in the system. I am specifically interested in the impact of exams or alternative certification models on pupils with additional support needs. I realise that “additional support needs” is a term that encompasses all sorts of needs, some of which may result in a young person finding an exam easier to access and some of which may mean that a young person finds continuous assessment easier to access.

In recent years, the response to criticism of how we support pupils with additional needs through exams has been simply to extend the length of time that those pupils get to complete the exam. On the one hand, that is understandable, and it provides those pupils with an additional opportunity, but, for some young folk with additional support needs, sitting in an exam hall for three and a half or four hours is even more challenging than it would be for any other young person. Your report did not mention additional support needs specifically. Is it an issue that you touched on at all? Did the issue of providing equity to those who have a wide spectrum of additional needs come up in the alternative systems that you looked at or in the best practice from elsewhere?

I apologise for being late. If this point has already been covered, feel free just to tell me to check the Official Report.

I will move the discussion about the skills that employers require away from the framing of academic or vocational qualifications. With either of those, we still use an individual form of assessment. As an employer, when I interview people, I am interested in their ability to work as part of a team and their skills in communicating with other individuals. Those are inherently not skills that we can assess individually, because they are about interaction with other people.

Whether in academic or vocational qualifications and assessment systems, is there best practice elsewhere for how to assess the kind of skills that we cannot assess in individual tasks? How do we assess someone’s ability to interact with other people in whatever form?