Seòmar agus comataidhean

As I said, I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for the offer to work with me on my amendments. On that basis, I am happy not to proceed with amendments 77, 78 and 91 at this stage.

If Pam Duncan-Glancy were to press amendment 326, which relates to having a majority of teachers or lecturers on the advisory council, I would support it. However, I suggest that, much like our experience in relation to the discussion on the qualifications Scotland board, that amendment will not be agreed to. Perhaps, as an alternative, if Ms Duncan-Glancy wished to work with me and the cabinet secretary on finding an acceptable alternative to what I have proposed in amendment 78, we might be able to get closer towards the position that she and I share on the involvement of teachers and lecturers.

Amendment 77 withdrawn.

Amendment 78 not moved.

Schedule 2 agreed to.

I strongly agree with the principle of amendment 237 and with exactly the point that Pam Duncan-Glancy just made. Does she agree that there would need to be an equal and opposite duty, which could perhaps be included in the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill, to ensure that those bodies also give due regard to any recommendations from qualifications Scotland, so that there is equality in both directions?

I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for her indications of support. Clearly, the drafting issue with amendment 280 will need to be addressed; the intention is for it to apply not simply to the first corporate plan, but to all corporate plans in perpetuity. Given that, and the cabinet secretary’s indication of her support for the principle, I am happy not to press amendment 280, but I will move amendments 35 and 71 once we come to consider those.

Amendment 280, by agreement, withdrawn.

Amendment 281 not moved.

Good evening, everyone.

My first amendment in this group seeks to address what I see as one of the issues that have led us to the present point as regards the relative passivity of the SQA board. Recently, there have been significant improvements—the board culture has improved, and the new chair has had a transformative effect—but many of the issues that have led us to this point could and should have been effectively scrutinised and, in some cases, prevented by the board of the existing authority. That did not happen. At points in recent years, the board has not played a particularly active role, certainly in relation to decisions about the delivery of qualifications and matters of education policy. I think that the board has been mostly adequate in relation to corporate governance.

In amendment 280, I propose that the board would have to actively approve the corporate plan—it would force the board to hold a vote on the plan. The intention is to give the board a firm nudge and to ensure that, ultimately, it actively agrees to the plan, rather than passively nodding it through.

We absolutely would have been in a better place if learner and teacher charters had been in place in 2020. My concern is that it would inevitably have been the case, given the assumptions that I am making about what will probably end up being in the charters, that it would not have been possible to comply with everything in those circumstances—in some cases, for legitimate reasons.

If amendments 261 and 271 were agreed to, it would leave the organisation in a position in which it would be breaking the law by not complying with the charters, which would be a bit disproportionate. In instances where the organisation has not been able to, or has chosen not to, comply with the charters, there are ways that we can bake in processes to hold it to account that fall short of creating a situation whereby it has broken the law. That is why I like the monitoring compliance aspects, and I hope that they are brought back at stage 3.

I agree with amendment 285, which would provide transparency through an annual report, but I cannot support amendments 261 and 271 as they are, particularly given that we do not yet know what absolutely will be in the charters. At this point, setting such a high threshold and saying that the organisation would be breaking the law by not complying with the charters, even though we do not know what they say yet, goes too far. As I said, I like aspects of the amendments and I hope that they come back at stage 3.

I cannot support amendments 266, 274 and 279, because they undermine the principle of the charters being produced in conjunction with learners, teachers and practitioners. The charters must have their buy-in, regardless of whether we go with co-design or consultation. As much as I want the strategic advisory council to play a powerful role in the organisation, giving the council an effective veto over the charters, which is what those amendments would do, would undermine learners’ and teachers’ voices.

Similarly, I cannot support amendment 273, because the teacher and practitioner charter should be about teachers’ and practitioners’ interests, and there are other ways to bring other voices in. For example, I have proposed that it is appropriate to require qualifications Scotland to consult employers before producing a corporate plan. I do not think that it is appropriate for employers to be involved in the drafting of a charter for teachers and practitioners, which I hope will be produced by teachers and practitioners.

I am happy to move past Katy Clark’s amendments. It sounds as though she is not pressing them, given the discussions that we have had already.

I am sympathetic to the intent of Martin Whitfield’s amendment 258, which goes back to my co-design amendments, Pam Duncan-Glancy’s amendment 255 and the cabinet secretary’s amendment 69. My issue with amendment 258 is that it would preclude co-design, because it would put the charter’s production and drafting entirely in the hands of an individual who was separate from the organisation.

In a broad way, we are all trying to achieve roughly similar goals. If none of us are moving our amendments—I will not press amendments 68 and 70 if I get reassurance from the cabinet secretary around co-design—then I ask Mr Whitfield not to press amendment 258, because, as it stands, it would make it impossible to do co-design. There is probably a way that we can accommodate both of our objectives at stage 3.

I acknowledge the point and I am grateful for the intervention. I argue that, in general, as much as it is not perfect and we all have frustrations about a variety of public bodies, the vast majority of public bodies are more responsive to the Parliament than the SQA has been. It has been a pretty extreme example of disregarding recommendations and the views expressed by the Parliament over a long period. Indeed, if the report that our predecessor committee produced in 2017 or 2018—Liz Smith, the cabinet secretary and I were on the committee at the time—had been fully taken on board by the SQA, the bill might not have been necessary in the first place. It was given multiple opportunities.

I take on board John Mason’s point, but I do not think that it necessarily follows that other public bodies would simply cease having regard to the instructions that are issued by Parliament, because, in practice, they generally do have regard to them. The point that I am trying to address is about this specific body.

Amendment 61 is relatively simple. The intention is to make sure that there is no gatekeeping of key information by qualifications Scotland staff and that, if the strategic advisory council makes a reasonable request for information to discharge its duties, that information is provided. Again, the amendment is a reflection of the issues of trust, transparency, accountability and so on that have got us here.

The debate on amendment 62 is equivalent to the debate on the presence of staff that we have already had in relation to the learner interest committee and the teacher and practitioner interest committee. There is no reason for members of qualifications Scotland staff to be on the strategic advisory council. The purpose of the council is to provide advice based on expertise, lived experience and so on. Given the debates that we have already had and the decisions that we have made in relation to those committees, it would be appropriate to take the same approach to the strategic advisory council.

Amendment 66 would clarify that qualifications Scotland staff can still attend meetings of the strategic advisory council. I of course want them to be there and to hear the discussions, but I want to make sure that the power dynamic in the room is appropriately balanced, and the best way to do that is for staff to not be members of the council.

My amendment 9, the cabinet secretary’s amendments 63, 64 and 65 and Pam Duncan-Glancy’s amendment 252 are all broadly in the same space of consultation. We have just had a similar debate on the wider duties on qualifications Scotland to consult. My amendment 9 is almost identical to the amendment that I moved in a previous group on qualifications Scotland. Given that the cabinet secretary has agreed to my key point about the need for consultation with the wider group of learners beyond the interest committees, and with those who undertake qualifications and those who deliver them, and on the basis of that previous discussion, I will be happy not to move amendment 9 if the cabinet secretary agrees to take the same approach with amendments 63, 64 and 65.

I suggest to Pam Duncan-Glancy that we take the same approach to amendment 252, so that we can resolve the issue around consultation requirements, responsibilities and encouragement—the nudge that I mentioned previously—in a coherent and consistent manner.

I will start off by talking to amendment 58, by way of explanation, as that will make for the most coherent sequencing.

Amendment 58 is, I hope, quite simple. It reflects the feedback that I have had, and that I know that other members have had, around the significant disillusionment among those who have, in good faith, given their time in order to give advice to the SQA in recent years, and who have either felt that that advice has not been taken on board, or simply never heard back and do not know what happened as a result.

It would be inappropriate to mandate that qualifications Scotland has to take on board whatever advice it has received. Advice can be contradictory, not all advice is correct, and two perfectly reasonable pieces of advice can be mutually exclusive. That is therefore not what I am seeking to do. I am simply seeking to provide a feedback loop to the strategic advisory council in particular. If we are expecting people to contribute to the success of the organisation through the strategic advisory council and, as specified in the legislation, to provide advice to the organisation, it is only reasonable to require the organisation to then feed back to the advisory council on how it has decided to act in response to that advice. That is therefore what amendment 58 seeks to do.

Amendments 57, 7 and 8 are on consultation requirements. They are really just about expanding the groups that we think that qualifications Scotland should consult as it goes about discharging its duties. Consulting those groups is not a requirement; the amendments relate to a section that specifies that qualifications Scotland should consult where it believes that it is “appropriate to do so”—so not in all circumstances. That goes back to what I described last week in relation to the nudge that we are trying to give the organisation. It is not necessary for qualifications Scotland to consult widely in every instance on every decision that it makes, but I want it to actively consider whether it should do so. In the past five years, certainly—indeed, I would argue in the past 10 to 20 years—there has been a range of occasions when the SQA would have benefited from consulting widely, particularly with students, learners, teachers and lecturers, on relatively simple decisions, where the consultation requirements would not have been onerous—situations when yes/no survey-type responses would have resulted in very valuable data.

Amendment 8 specifies who we are talking about in that regard. As a matter of course, qualifications Scotland should consult the learner interest committee and the teacher and practitioner interest committee, but I have also specified that it should consult those undertaking qualifications and those who are delivering the qualifications—in other words, students, teachers and lecturers—and I have included a catch-all reference to any others that qualifications Scotland believes to be appropriate.

Again, this is about trying to provide a clear direction of travel and an indication of what we expect from the organisation, without being too prescriptive about all the circumstances under which it must consult. The point is that consulting only the committees is not necessarily enough and that the organisation should consider whether, in certain circumstances, it is appropriate to consult more widely. Certainly, an element of the feedback that we have received up until now is that, even where good-quality consultation has taken place—for example, with the learner panel of the SQA—the vast majority of learners in Scotland have not known anything about it, and there should be wider consultation. Even if the response is not necessarily taken on board, the act of consultation, in and of itself, generates buy-in to the decisions that are eventually made and generates good faith in the organisation.

Amendment 60 is an unusual one. I acknowledge from the start that I am not aware of other circumstances in which we are so specific in legislation that a public body must give due regard to the views expressed by the Parliament. However, again, that reflects our experience with the SQA, which has brought us to this point. It would not be appropriate to specify that all recommendations made by the Parliament be taken on board. We can all acknowledge that, as much as our committee inquiry reports are generally of a very high quality, it is not necessarily the case that we get everything right all the time, and we cannot mandate that those be followed.

I am grateful to the member for his intervention, and for not making the intervention that was requested by Mr Kerr, because I am about to conclude.

The principle of democratic accountability and the Crown are two somewhat alien and mutually exclusive concepts. In practical terms, however, the point that I am making is not about the institution of the monarchy, but about the head of state. Even a president should not be able to flick through the CVs of potential candidates for chief inspector. Indeed, given that we have—nominally, although I would disagree—a politically neutral and independent head of state in the King, it would be deeply inappropriate if they ever intervened in the process and rejected a nominee that was put forward to them by the Scottish ministers. That would go against the constitutional settlement that we have in the modern United Kingdom, and it would certainly go against the settlement that the monarchy purports to support in respect of neutrality in that regard.

As I said, this set of amendments is really about the principle of efficiency. I do not think that the appointments and oversight process should be done via the Crown, which is symbolically independent but not independent in practice. For it to be genuinely independent, the process would include the possibility of the Crown rejecting proposed appointments that were made by the Scottish ministers, which would violate a pretty core element of our existing constitutional set-up.

I take on board the cabinet secretary’s point about the specifics of Education Scotland being an executive agency, for example, but does Pam Duncan-Glancy agree that, while the principle behind the amendments should not be necessary, the performance of those bodies, particularly in the past five to 10 years and a longer period of time, has unfortunately demonstrated that we have a national qualifications body and a curriculum body that, between them, decided that someone could take up to nine national 5 qualifications but that each one had a 140-hour course requirement, despite the fact that nine times 140 hours cannot be timetabled into a school year?