Chamber and committees

I prefer to be brief, convener.

Mainstreaming is an important area. I am sure that everyone supports the mainstreaming approach, but, as we see in the written evidence, there are consequences for wider learning, for other pupils and for the classroom environment. I am keen to understand more about what that looks like and what we can do to try to address those issues. Perhaps Laurie Black could comment first.

Do teachers feel that they get enough support when such incidents happen, to help them to manage the circumstances?

Would any of the other witnesses like to comment?

Thank you, Professor Stobart. That has been very helpful.

Thank you for your refreshingly frank introduction, professor. My questions cover three areas: the staging posts of qualifications; the effect of a leaving qualification on the leaving age, whether from school or education; and motivation.

On staging posts, some pupils like to get qualifications in the bag as they go rather than leaving it all to the very end—the last year—and putting all the stakes on one option. We currently have three years of nat 5s, highers and advanced highers. I know that you are not making a specific recommendation, but the hint is that you want to strip things down. How far would you go? How far would it be reasonable to go? What are the trade-offs around that?

Currently, unlike some other countries, we allow pupils to leave at 16. I think that, in the past, some of my family left school at 14. The leaving age is now 16; other countries have gone for a leaving age of 18.

If we had a leaving qualification—not necessarily from school, but from education—would we need to raise the leaving age? Would we need further reform around the leaving age?

My final question is about motivation. Some teachers and pupils tell us that having the focus of an exam gets them out of a rut and makes them work—it motivates them to achieve. However, I know that every pupil learns in a different way. Will you talk about what we might lose if we were to move towards having more assessments and away from exams at the end of the academic year? What are the issues?

That is an interesting point. The vocational offer in schools is often criticised as not being sufficient. The academic route continues to be the predominant priority. Do you think that the vocational offer in schools is good enough, in the event that we went for a leaving qualification and raised the age for leaving education or training?

I want to talk about colleges and regionalisation. Do you think that the regionalisation has achieved the objectives that were set out in 2011?

I want to touch on universities, which are under—[Inaudible.]—and, in particular, are more reliant on potentially volatile international student numbers, because the world is volatile. The finances in those institutions, which are otherwise amazingly successful, are still unpredictable. That means that there is quite a significant demand on the public sector, although those institutions nevertheless are, and have been, quite independent, which is in large part why they are so successful.

How do you go about doing your job with universities? I noted a little bit of frustration in one of the remarks, about being unable to measure effectively, because it is not so easy to do. How do you strike a balance between those institutions’ independence, and therefore their success, and the need for the public sector to be able to measure and scrutinise what is happening in them?