Chamber and committees

Garvin, do you want to say something?

Of course. Do teachers believe that they benefit from inspections, rather than just being a target of them?

Thank you for your answers so far, minister. This question is wordy and complex, so I will read most of it. Moving on to the Scottish Government’s historic commitments in relation to Scottish statutory instruments, you will be aware that, on a number of occasions, the committee has requested an update on the amendment to the Scotland Act 1998 (Specification of Functions and Transfer of Property etc) Order 2019. At the previous session, the then minister said:

“The work is really complicated and quite difficult for the officials to get sorted. We are in the process of fixing it and getting it sorted”—[Official Report, Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee, 19 March 2024; c 6.]

Can you give us an update on the progress on the commitment to resolve those issues?

So, work towards that commitment is being continued. I hope that we can look forward to seeing that next year.

That would be great, because we will be seeing you again.

That is good to hear. In addition to that on-going commitment, the Scottish Government has made seven other commitments that are outstanding—five dating from 2023 and two from 2024. What is being done to ensure that all those seven commitments are met?

Lessons will have been learned from the 2023 legislation and brought to bear on the 2024 legislation, so presumably the issue will have been resolved in its own way.

Yes—thanks, convener.

As has been said, it is very important that schools are not pinned to the wall and vilified because somebody has decided that something is not right. The fact is that every school has an overarching local authority, and the local authority’s contribution to the delivery of education needs to be evaluated, too. I see what you are saying about not pinning people to the wall and saying, “You’re no doing it right”, “You’re doing it wrong” or whatever, because there is more to it all than an immediate inspection would suggest. How do you communicate to learners, their parents and their carers—and, in fact, to voters in local authority areas—how a school is performing once you have overcome the difficulties with the present inspection regime? How do you get that out and let people know how a school is improving?

You have a lot of work there by the sounds of it. Thank you very much indeed for that.

I have a potentially controversial question for Gillian Hamilton. What is your view of the suggestion that the inspectorate should be able to inspect the function and performance of other national bodies?

I presume, then, that the witnesses are proposing that the correct way forward would be for us to be able to hear about not just when somebody has done something wrong, but all the things that are being done well. We need to push those things out, too, so that people believe in schools and we raise their expectations of schools and what they deliver.