Chamber and committees

Part of the issue is that, if we move away from exams towards some form of continuous assessment, there is likely to be an additional workload for teachers in that system. There are other opportunities in our education system to reduce teacher workload, such as changes that we can make to curriculum for excellence, if workload increases through continuous assessment.

My impression, from speaking to a lot of teachers in recent years, is that they are inclined towards a system of continuous assessment. They see the advantages of it, but the personal workload burden holds them back from adopting a system that they otherwise understand a lot of the attractions of.

I would like to return to the issue of equity in the system. I am specifically interested in the impact of exams or alternative certification models on pupils with additional support needs. I realise that “additional support needs” is a term that encompasses all sorts of needs, some of which may result in a young person finding an exam easier to access and some of which may mean that a young person finds continuous assessment easier to access.

In recent years, the response to criticism of how we support pupils with additional needs through exams has been simply to extend the length of time that those pupils get to complete the exam. On the one hand, that is understandable, and it provides those pupils with an additional opportunity, but, for some young folk with additional support needs, sitting in an exam hall for three and a half or four hours is even more challenging than it would be for any other young person. Your report did not mention additional support needs specifically. Is it an issue that you touched on at all? Did the issue of providing equity to those who have a wide spectrum of additional needs come up in the alternative systems that you looked at or in the best practice from elsewhere?

I apologise for being late. If this point has already been covered, feel free just to tell me to check the Official Report.

I will move the discussion about the skills that employers require away from the framing of academic or vocational qualifications. With either of those, we still use an individual form of assessment. As an employer, when I interview people, I am interested in their ability to work as part of a team and their skills in communicating with other individuals. Those are inherently not skills that we can assess individually, because they are about interaction with other people.

Whether in academic or vocational qualifications and assessment systems, is there best practice elsewhere for how to assess the kind of skills that we cannot assess in individual tasks? How do we assess someone’s ability to interact with other people in whatever form?

That raises an interesting point about how a change in assessment might interact with the reform of the school inspection system and what role peer assessment between teachers might have as we create a new inspectorate after the current review. The committee should keep an eye on those overlapping pieces of work.

I will refine my question. You are right that local authorities are extensively scrutinised, typically by national bodies such as the Accounts Commission. My concern goes back to the points that Liz Smith raised about empowering communities. Those who scrutinise local authorities nationally do not live in the communities in which the local authorities are delivering services; that is the role of local councillors and the elected members in a council. My concern is whether councils, as elected bodies, are scrutinising the delivery of the public services for which they are responsible, and not whether we at a national level, in whatever form, are scrutinising those bodies effectively.

Thank you. That is all from me.

My second question follows up on Stephen Boyle’s earlier comments about what we are measuring and what data we are collecting. We spend a lot of time focusing on inputs instead of on the outcomes that we are trying to get from these processes. That touches on something in Professor Roy’s written submission about how the national performance framework was supposed to change that. It was supposed to shift us away from a focus on inputs and towards measuring those outcomes and delivering on that aspect of the Christie commission’s recommendations. From your perspective, has the NPF helped? Has it had a tangible impact?

I will continue on the wider issue around local government, because it raises a question about scrutiny. Parliament constantly grapples with whether we scrutinise the Government effectively. It is a single institution, so we can have a national conversation about effective scrutiny of the Scottish Government, but that is not the case with 32 different local authorities.

Is there effective scrutiny of the delivery of public services at individual council level? I do not ask that question to imply criticism of councillors; my concern is that we are full-time elected parliamentarians with considerable staff and resource support, whereas the role of a councillor is part time with almost no support. That raises concerns about how effectively councillors can scrutinise the delivery of public services in their communities. Is that a barrier to delivering on Christie in the way that we have spent the past hour or so talking about?

Yes. I realise that I explained that in the pre-brief but not when the meeting went into public session. I apologise to our witnesses that I have to drop out. I will not go on for too long, because—[Inaudible.]—questions have already been asked. I am interested in the part of your submission that mentions the work that you are planning on the provision of additional support for learning in schools. Could you lay out what you envisage for the scope of that work? Is it a look into the provision for additional support needs in mainstream schools? Will you consider specialist schools or will you look across the board at all ASN provision in tertiary education?

That might be an area of interest for the committee in the future. In so far as the Government has explained it, one of the intended purposes of the SNSAs is to measure our progress in narrowing the attainment gap, given the targeted funding through the attainment challenge fund and so on. If SNSAs are working as intended, we should, in theory, be able to use the data that they produce to measure whether the targeted funding interventions are working. I encourage committee colleagues to consider that area—[Inaudible.] It would be helpful if further thought could be given to whether they are fulfilling that purpose in relation to the targeted funding.