Seòmar agus comataidhean

Thank you. I will let other members come in. I again apologise for the disruption at the start of the meeting.

Hello.

I find that last comment very helpful. Can I infer from what you are saying that the purposes, the values and the objectives are things that your office may have been doing anyway but that people cannot just take that for granted? It is about putting that out openly in the public domain, and, as you expand the staffing team in your office, making sure that staff are clear about what it means. I particularly like the bit about whether members of the public feel you are upholding your purposes, your values and your strategic objectives. I think that that is really helpful—it was a helpful answer.

Page 5 of the draft strategic plan sets out some key changes that you wish to deliver, such as

“Recruiting and developing staff to ensure consistent high quality of our professional skills base”.

I think that there are six or seven key changes. I will not run through them all because of time constraints and the fact that my eyesight probably will not allow me to see the tiny typing on the handout that I have. How do you think that the key changes that you have set out will improve the quality of the outputs from your office? You may want to pick one or two of them and flesh out the differences that you think they will make.

That is very helpful, and I absolutely recognise that two-term dash. I do not think that the OECD has been prescriptive about how that could be fixed. Some schools currently do nat 5 or highers over two years. They pace the curriculum and syllabus at a much more appropriate level for students. I get that. On additional provision of the further education that is already dropping down into schools, I absolutely get the idea of expanding those pathways and broadening that out.

My follow-up question relates to assessments. I see reference in the report to much more use of portfolio work, continuous assessment and teacher judgment—with appropriate moderation, of course. I also see that some of that moderation for continuous assessment should be external to the school, in order to build much more chunky checks and balances into the system. There is a lot to welcome in there.

My question is in the context of the poverty-related attainment gap. In years gone by, when we have given young people more content to produce, the young people who had better support at home for preparing folio work were, quite often, from higher-income backgrounds. They had more time and space at home, and they had tutors and that kind of thing.

I support what has been said, but would we have to be careful to broaden out continuous assessment, and not to build in an advantage, as we did with external assessment, for a cohort of young people who might be in a better place to take up the benefits of continuous assessment because of all the additional advantages of things such as tutors and parental support?

It has been a fascinating evidence session so far. I have a few questions on some of the recommendations on what the report sees as the mismatch between the senior phase of school and curriculum for excellence. One point is that there is too narrow a range of learning activities in the senior phase. I am keen to know how that might be improved and how you would broaden out the activities. There is much talk about diversity of pathways being required and about lack of time to go into detail in some subjects. I wonder about the range of learning activities and about going into detail on subjects.

If I have it correctly, the OECD’s suggestion is that there should be a limited number of core subjects in the senior phase, and some subjects in which students go into much more specialist detail. I am open minded on that, but I wonder whether it might have the unintended consequence of narrowing options for young people in the senior phase. I am interested in hearing your comments on that.

I am a new member of the committee, so I will look at the legacy paper carefully. We have agreed to take in private our work programme agenda item, which is the convention not just in this committee but across all committees. I was really pleased with the tone that you set in your initial remarks, convener, and I hope that Mr Mundell might reflect on his tone. That said, our committee will look at not only this OECD report but the further report on assessments and certification later in the year. That should go without saying, but Mr Mundell felt the need to raise the issue. I respect that but, moving forward, I hope that we can work collegiately and non-tribally, as the convener suggested. I hope that we can all live up to that.

I am happy to nominate Kaukab Stewart.

There is nothing that I am required to declare, but it makes sense to note that I was a teacher for 10 years. I was registered with the General Teaching Council for Scotland and was a member of the Educational Institute of Scotland.

Likewise, I have no relevant interests to declare.

Thank you.