Seòmar agus comataidhean

I take on board the cabinet secretary’s point about amendment 60, and I will restrain myself from giving a much longer response to the interventions of Liz Smith and Martin Whitfield on the wider question of the performance of the Parliament, parliamentary scrutiny and our capacity to do that. Having written most of the Green group’s response to the work that Mr Whitfield’s committee is currently doing on that, I welcome that work, as he may have been able to tell from the tone of some of my contribution.

I am happy not to press amendment 57 and not to move amendments 7 and 8 in relation to consultation, and to continue speaking to the cabinet secretary about that. The key point that I was looking for was an acknowledgement of the need in some circumstances for that wider consultation, not just consultation with the committees. The cabinet secretary has acknowledged that and, if we can come back at stage 3 with something satisfactory, I will be happy with that.

As I have said, I will not move amendment 60.

I will move amendment 58 and press it to a vote, because the requirement that it would place is not onerous. We are already placing into legislation the requirement for the strategic advisory council to give advice, so it is proportionate to place a reciprocal requirement on qualifications Scotland to respond.

Amendment 57, by agreement, withdrawn.

Amendments 7 and 8 not moved.

Amendment 58 moved—[Ross Greer].

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?

I am glad that Pam Duncan-Glancy lodged the amendments. I thoroughly enjoy stretching the scope of a bill to its greatest possible extent, as anybody who is tracking the Housing (Scotland) Bill will have noticed.

This is a useful debate, because I agree that Education Scotland underperforms and needs to be dramatically improved. A legitimate debate is to be had about its status as an executive agency. It seems to be implicit, but not entirely clear, that curriculum Scotland would take a number of the responsibilities that are currently those of Education Scotland. Is it Pam Duncan-Glancy’s intention that Education Scotland staff would transfer to curriculum Scotland? If so, would that be under the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations? What kind of consultation would she envisage with unions?

Subsequent to that, despite the fact that she has, rightly, posed the question about regulation-making powers to the Government a number of times, the amendments as currently drafted—I take the point that they are not being moved—do not specify the use of the affirmative procedure. Does she agree that, if we were ever to go about such a dramatic change—which, apart from anything else, would involve large numbers of Scottish Government staff being moved into another body and having their terms of employment changed—there would need to be a high level of parliamentary scrutiny; and, if we were to agree to it, that we should not write a blank cheque to ministers to decide how to go about it without subsequent parliamentary scrutiny?

I am sorry for cutting off Pam Duncan-Glancy. I should have come in more quickly, at the end of her explanation on amendment 248. I am sympathetic to some elements of that amendment, particularly with regard to those who have lived experience of the system. However, not to use pejorative language, but the phrase “the blob” has been used a few times to refer to the plethora of public bodies that are involved in Education Scotland and how, when they come together, they tend to generate more inertia than momentum in the system. My concern is that, by bringing so many of them into the strategic advisory council, we would make it harder for those who try to bring their lived and practical experience of the system to the fore in those discussions.

Does the member recognise those concerns about the presence of so many people from the other public bodies that are involved in the sphere, as opposed to the lived experience of young people, parents, teachers, lecturers and so on?

On the issue of terms and conditions, my concern is that the Scottish Government sets a floor on terms and conditions through its fair work policies, on which a lot of progress has been made in recent years. It seems that amendment 147 would take the inspectors out of that process. Could you address that concern?

I get the broad direction of travel, and I will talk about the amendments more widely in a moment, but on terms and conditions specifically, my worry is that the amendment would take the inspectors out of alignment with other Scottish public sector workers, who benefit from fair work policies that have long been campaigned for, particularly by trade unions.

Despite the notable absence of the 20-page speech and our much-missed colleague Mr Kerr, the issue has been well aired. Given the time, I am happy to conclude there. I will press the lead amendment in the group, but, in expectation of the result, I will not subject members to having to vote on every amendment in the group once we come to them.

Oh—my apologies.