Chamber and committees

Excellent.

Absolutely—I agree with much of that. Would it be fair to say that, if we were to embark on such a piece of work, the appropriate body to undertake or co-ordinate it would either be Education Scotland or the Government’s learning directorate?

As the national education agency, you are ideally placed to co-ordinate a piece of work that would use case studies to look at, for example, a school in an urban area with high levels of deprivation, a school in a rural area that sits in the middle of SIMD and a school with a high level of students for whom English is a second language. Could you decide to do that, or would you need direction from the Government? Would you need the cabinet secretary to tell you, “We have now been running this funding programme for long enough, so I want to see the kind of longitudinal work that School Leaders Scotland has suggested”?

That is really useful—particularly your point about schools not being afraid to try something and fail. We should encourage that kind of innovation, and we have certainly heard evidence in the past of reticence about taking a risk and failing resulting in a lack of innovation. It is really healthy that schools are being encouraged to take acceptable risks and to know that the local authority will not come down on them for “wasting” money.

I put to the same question to Tony McDaid. How do you go about that? I know that your authority was not previously a challenge authority, but you have had some relevant funds. Now that we are moving to the new model, what approach will you be taking?

Finally, will Gerry Lyons comment on the new guidance that has recently come out on providing annual reports on how the money is spent to parent councils, for example? On one level, that provides a really healthy level of not local scrutiny, but local accountability and engagement. However, there is perhaps a danger that that will create false expectations that you can do something totally transformational in relation to embedded societal problems within the space of a year. How do you plan to get the balance right in Glasgow in giving parent councils the information that they deserve to have but getting their expectations right on what that means in relation to annual reporting?

I want to follow up on that line of questioning. I am interested in your approach to making sure that we get robust evaluation and that the money is spent on initiatives that are actually effective, without putting such an administrative burden on schools that staff spend more time on evaluating programmes than they spend on actually delivering better outcomes for young people.

I will start with Ruth Binks because, given the length of time in which Inverclyde Council has been a challenge authority, you have probably developed quite a coherent approach by this stage.

I come to Mark Ratter to move the discussion on. It is impossible for the committee to scrutinise in detail what every local authority and every school spends the money on. We should not do that, because every local authority has its own elected representatives who are responsible for scrutiny at the local level. Will you give us an example of what that looks like in East Renfrewshire? What kinds of report do you prepare for councillors? What scrutiny is provided at that level?

Thank you very much. We would certainly be very grateful for that. Would any of the other witnesses like to provide any specific examples?

Thank you very much. That was really useful.

I believe that Greg Dempster is looking to come in.

Thank you very much. Andrea Bradley and Mike Corbett want to come in. I am conscious that I am probably eating into colleagues’ time, though, so, if you do not mind, I ask you to be brief in your responses.

I will stick with the point about evaluation. I am interested in examples of local good practice. This morning, a number of anecdotal examples have been given of good practice in deploying the funds, but I am interested in whether any of the witnesses are aware of schools, clusters, local authorities or even regional improvement collaboratives that are already doing a really good job of local evaluation. It would be of considerable interest to the committee if you could point us towards examples of successful evaluation in practice. I ask Jim Thewliss to answer first.