Chamber and committees

Ian Elliott, you mentioned in your submission that

“administrative leadership”

on the NPF has

“diminished over time.”

You have alluded to that already. Will you go into a bit more detail on who you are referring to and why that has been the case?

The group of individuals that Daniel Johnson and I met last week in Govan began to coalesce around the word “implicit” when we asked them about the alignment between their organisations’ strategic plans and the NPF. I will start with a relatively general question to Jennifer Wallace: is it fair to say that, at the moment, the NPF operates more like a set of general principles that shape public sector culture in Scotland than a specific set of measurable outcomes?

When leadership was there previously, where was it coming from? Did it come from the permanent secretary or from directors general?

I will stick with the question of leadership and ownership. In his submission, Max French made an interesting comparison between the Scottish model of appointing champions in the civil service for various outcomes, and the approach in Northern Ireland, where there were more-defined owners. However, he noted that there were significant levels of internal opposition in the public sector in Northern Ireland. Are those two things related?

Has the model in Northern Ireland of appointing owners, rather than champions, so that there is very direct accountability, contributed to the internal opposition, or are those unrelated issues?

I am sorry to jump in. You are right that there needs to be a whole-system approach, but somebody needs to lead the piece of work in order to get it started.

Will you consider leading that piece of work or do you need direction from Government? For example, do you need the cabinet secretary to say to you, “This is a strategic priority, so I would like you to co-ordinate it. I would like you to commission academics and work with partners and so on”, or is that something that Education Scotland, using its executive authority, can go ahead and do?

If there is time, convener, I have one more question about inspectors and inspections—it relates somewhat to the issue of longitudinal work and the length of time between inspections of individual schools. When your inspectors go into a school and engage with it as part of that regular programme, do they ask standard questions about specific points related to the use of attainment funding as part of their report? Could you give us a bit more detail on the role that the inspectors play in making sure that we are gathering the right kind of evidence in a supportive manner?

Now that that has been the case for seven years, has there been any collation or review of what inspectors come back with, or any identification of common trends in their reports?

This is probably a question for Patricia Watson in the first instance, but feel free to refer it to colleagues if that is more appropriate. I am looking to draw together some of the threads in the various answers that you have given already.

A couple of weeks ago, the committee heard evidence from Jim Thewliss of School Leaders Scotland. He is one of a number of witnesses who have suggested that there is a need for some longitudinal studies on the impact of the funding. We are at the stage at which an entire cohort could have gone through their whole time at primary or secondary with the funding in place, so this is an appropriate point at which to do some high-quality and in-depth longitudinal work to assess the impact of that.

You have mentioned the various bits of assessment work that you have been doing. In the work that you are already doing, is there anything that matches the description of what Jim Thewliss asked for? If the answer is no, do you have any plans to do the longitudinal work that people are interested in?