Chamber and committees

Thank you very much indeed. This week, you made an important statement in a blog reflecting on 10 years since the Christie commission report was produced. If you do not mind me quoting you, because I think that it is important that this is on the record, I note that you warned that the country “remains riven by inequalities”, but you also said that it remains the case that there is

“a major implementation gap between policy ambitions and delivery on the ground.”

With reference to this morning’s inquiry, you said that

“progress on closing the poverty-related attainment gap between the most and least deprived school pupils had been limited.”

That is a very powerful statement of how you see things. Could you reflect on that and perhaps outline for us what you think needs to change so that that huge implementation gap that you spoke about can be closed?

Thank you, Mr Clark. I now turn to Sharon Dowey, who has a series of questions to ask.

Thank you. Before I widen the questioning, there is one other thing that I want to come back to, which again was mentioned in your opening statement—the OECD report that came out in June this year, just a couple of months after your own report was produced. In the briefing note for today’s committee meeting, you say that there are some common themes between the conclusions you arrived at and the conclusions and recommendations that were made by the OECD. It would be useful for us to hear from you what those common themes are and whether there are clear recommendations that come from those common themes that would do what the report says we need to do. I think that we are all agreed on the need to improve outcomes for young people in a broader sense through school education.

I will open the questioning to the whole committee now, starting with Willie Coffey.

Thank you. That has been a very useful line of questioning. I will now turn to Colin Beattie, who has a number of questions around outcomes.

Craig Hoy has a series of questions. I think that he wants to make a declaration of interests before he puts his questions.

I think that Antony Clark wants to come in with a few points on the same area.

One of the things that is mentioned in the report, which I think Mr Boyle referred to, is data. Paragraph 25 of the report puts it very starkly when it says:

“The Scottish Government’s national aim is to improve outcomes for all, but it has not set out by how much or by when.”

From an auditing perspective, that sounds like quite a major flaw, doesn’t it?

We will return to some of these themes during the course of this morning’s session. As you stated at the beginning, the report takes us up to January 2021 and, obviously, quite a lot has happened since that time. Have you been able to gather any more information about where things are now? Have you been able to understand whether some of the actions that were recommended in your report, for example, have been followed up at a central and local government level?

Thank you very much indeed.

On behalf of the committee, I thank Stephen Boyle and his team this morning—Antony Clark, Tricia Meldrum and Zoe McGuire—for keeping us informed and answering the questions that we put. We really appreciate your time and the work that you are doing.

I draw the public part of this morning’s committee to an end.