Examination of Witnesses (Questions 520-539)
MS HAZEL MATHIESON, MS KATIE HUTTON MR KEVIN SWEENEY
14 MAY 2008
Q520 Mr Davidson: Chairman, I wonder if I could pick up a point from the statements that have already been made in writing, particularly from Govan High. As the Chairman has indicated, I think we were all impressed by the statements that yourself and Iain White made when you met us, but in the statement, Iain mentions in particular the criticism of the Inspectorate. I wonder if you could maybe just expand on that point for us because, as I understand it, the Inspectorate are not actually adequately recognising the efforts that some schools are making to encourage vocational education because they only assess schools according to academic results, so maybe you could just clarify that position and what the consequences of that are.
Mr Sweeney: Certainly. Govan High School was part of a general inspection about a year ago. During that, our experience of dealing with the Inspectorate was that they operate very much with tunnel vision. They tick boxes of their own devising and they have a very limited range of things they are willing to acknowledge as legitimate activities for an educational establishment to be pursuing. In other words, they are obsessed with attainment in the standard grade and higher exam results. The Inspectorate team that came to our school did very little to acknowledge the huge range of vocational activity that takes place in our curriculum. That is why my headteacher has given you a negative statement regarding the Inspectorate which I, as deputy, endorse because the Scottish curriculum, as it stands today, is a 20th-Century curriculum and it is not yet flexible enough to deal with the demands of 21st-Century young people. With particular reference to the area that this Committee is looking into, recruitment for the defence industry, in our area that means the shipyards, that means firms like Thales Optronics. In other words, it means engineering. However, our school has a very limited capability to deliver in the area of engineering, partly because our own local authority sold its schools in a PPP deal and then proceeded to rip out our technical department when they refurbished it only for it to take us six years to build that technical department up a little where we can now, as of August 2008, put engineering back on the curriculum. To go back to Mr Davidson's question, the Inspectorate in Scotland are obsessed with exam results and with league tables. They do not acknowledge, much less celebrate, work that takes place in areas that do not lead to standard grade or higher passes. They were rather harsh on us as a school because we were in the vanguard of changing the curriculum from a failing academic approach to what is now being proved to be a much more successful vocational approach. Subjects that did our children no favours in terms of giving them employment skills and employment prospects were removed from our syllabus to be replaced by subjects which would give young people a chance when it gets them into the interview room. Some of the subjects we introduced were not Scottish-qualification SQA subjects. We went out and looked at the industry and, for example, in the area of ICT we no longer offer SQA computing, but we do offer Cisco and Microsoft courses and we have some anecdotal evidence that the young people who have graduated from these programmes are getting really good jobs in these industries. Our big one now is to emulate that in the field of engineering which is why we are entering into partnership with further education colleges and with employers in order to try to have our young people mentored through an engineering programme that will actually lead to jobs for them. To go again back to your question, Mr Davidson, none of that was acknowledged by the Inspectorate when they visited our school, not a sentence of it went into the Inspector's report on our school. The word "attainment" appears in this report 38 times and the word "achievement" appears twice, so that shows you where the inspectors are coming from.
Q521 Mr Davidson: Just following that up, why are the Inspectorate so useless, from an unbiased perspective? To whom are the Inspectorate responsible? Who inspects the Inspectorate?
Mr Sweeney: The Inspectorate. They are answerable to no one but the Scottish Executive directly.
Q522 Chairman: That is the reason they are useless then!
Mr Sweeney: That is why they are the way they are, Mr Sarwar!
Q523 Mr MacNeil: When were you inspected?
Mr Sweeney: January 2007.
Q524 Mr Walker: I am quite interested in what you were saying about vocational qualifications. We have just done the Skills and Training Bill, it has finished its parliamentary stages, though I am not sure that it relates to Scotland because it is a devolved issue, but the idea is to ensure that children and youngsters between the ages of 16 and 18 are either in full-time education or in jobs with vocational training. Can I just ask you what subjects you removed from your syllabus?
Mr Sweeney: It was not a case of our consciously removing subjects from the syllabus. The subjects removed themselves because, when the young people were offered other options, they chose vocational options. For example, history came off our syllabus for a couple of years, though it is back on now, because the children simply did not choose it. Instead, the children were choosing things like hairdressing because we built a hairdressing and beauty salon in the school in partnership with an employer and a college. The young people were also choosing things like the ICT courses that I mentioned, but modern languages, for example, are dying on their feet in our school. There is one French teacher teaching a couple of French classes and that is all that is left of modern languages because the children do not choose them. They choose vocational subjects because they know that vocational subjects will lead them to employment when they leave school. With the kind of school in the kind of area where very, very few of our young people will aspire to university, this year only two will leave our school to go to university, therefore, the number one thing for us has to be to give the children employment skills and the only way we can do that is by putting vocational subjects and activities on the curriculum, and the kids respond; that is what they choose when they do their option choices.
Q525 Mr Carmichael: I do know a wee bit about your school; my mother went through there long before probably either you or I were born, certainly before I was born! I was at university in Glasgow in the early 1980s with a number of your former pupils at that stage and I do not doubt what you are saying about your school and about the low number of people who aspire to go into higher education, but historically that was not the position. Historically, Govan High produced a tremendous number of very motivated and high-achieving individuals. When did that change and why did it change?
Mr Sweeney: The demise of the area and of our school role is directly related to the shipyards closing in Govan because, when the employment went, the people who had the wherewithal went as well and they did not come back. That is compounded by dreadful, dreadful housing conditions in some parts of Govan which, to its credit, Glasgow City Council is addressing by knocking them down.
Q526 Mr Carmichael: It was never thus though.
Mr Sweeney: But, once the houses are down, the people go away and, until the Greater Govan Regeneration Plan was passed last year, they were not building houses for people to live in to replace the old houses, they were building industrial units. With the Greater Govan Regeneration Plan being passed, they will at last start to build housing again, but at the moment the Govan community is not sure if it is going to be an appropriate kind of housing. Will it be family housing? Unlikely. Will it be yuppie flats? Likely, certainly up by the river. The short answer to your question is that, when the work went, the people went and, as a result, the population of Govan are those who cannot, and will not, work, mainly cannot because they are old or they are infirm or they do not have the required skills, and those are the parents of our children. I know for a fact that some of our pupils are fourth and fifth generation unemployed. There is no culture of work in their families, there is no culture of work in their streets and in their community and you can imagine all of the other social problems that that brings, and that is why our school is in a position of dealing with young people whom we must make employable because few of them will go into higher education
Mr Carmichael: You will probably break the cycle.
Q527 Mr Walker: What do you do with your academic children? Just because you come from a poor background, it makes it difficult, but you still will have gifted children academically who need to be reached. How do you manage that?
Mr Sweeney: Yes, we do have such children. They are the minority of the school population and what we do is we make sure that they are supported in the choices that they make if they choose to go the academic route. The curriculum is structured such that yes, much of it has a vocational slant, but, if you are a bright youngster and you are aspiring to get your five highers and to go on to university, we will have pathways through the school in order to let you do that. In fact, we are just about to implement a massive curricular change where we have reduced the number of subjects children do each year from eight to five and we have also introduced annual option choices, so, as of August 2008, every young person in our school will be doing five subjects that they have chosen or been guided into by careers advice. They will do a one-year course in that subject and hopefully be successful in it and get a certificate at the end of the year, then they can choose again and they can repeat that performance five times as they progress through years one to six. Theoretically, the very bright young person could leave our school at age 16 with 15 certificates rather than the traditional eight and, if they stay on into the sixth year, they can add another five on to that, so, if you are an academic youngster, that gives you two possible routes. You can go the route of sticking with your chosen subjects, so, for example, if you want to be a doctor, you do English, maths and three sciences and you just repeat that and go up the levels, intermediate one, intermediate two, higher, advanced higher and university, or, if you do not know exactly what you want to do for a job, you can chop and change at the end of each year and just rack up the certificates so that, when you finally do reach an employer's interview room, you can sit there with your wee folder and say, "I don't have any standard grades. I've got 15 intermediates and highers though", and that will be impressive and that will get them into further education, higher education or employment, should they so choose.
Mr Walker: I think this is very interesting and, if we are making visits, I would be interested in going to see this school because it is very difficult to conceptualise it.
Chairman: We have seen it.
Q528 Mr Walker: I am sorry.
Mr Sweeney: You would be more than welcome to come and see us.
Mr Walker: Yes, I will come up on my own. It is very interesting.
Q529 Mr Devine: We were very impressed when we went up to Scotland to meet Iain and yourself and I am sure the report will reflect that, but can I ask you, Hazel, I am assuming you were working with Scottish Enterprise up until April?
Ms Mathieson: Yes.
Q530 Mr Devine: It was a legitimate decision of the Scottish Government to abolish Scottish Enterprise and, prior to working here, I was a member of Forth Valley Scottish Enterprise and I have seen genuine good work that has been done. Is the restructuring that the Scottish Government have introduced fit for purpose for the 21st Century that Kevin was talking about or is it too early to tell?
Ms Mathieson: Scottish Enterprise was set up 17 years ago to bring the economic development and the skills agenda together, which I think it did. What we have now done is we have pulled the skills element out, but we have combined the skills element with many other bodies which are also delivering a skills element. I think what we had was a bit of a cluttered landscape and possibly not all driving in the same directions. What we now have is Skills Development Scotland having a lead role to try and focus all the different skills bodies. For instance, we have the Funding Council for the universities and colleges, the SQA and other skills bodies and we are all going to drive forward together. One of the issues for us which we must do is maintain the relationship with Scottish Enterprise because Scottish Enterprise still does exist, though the local enterprise company structure does not exist any longer, but we have to maintain that relationship with Scottish Enterprise because, for all we need to do to drive forward and make significant change to the skills agenda, we must always keep linking back to the economic agenda because skills does still fit with the economic agenda, and we need to do that; that is part of the raison d'etre that we have been set up to deliver.
Q531 Mr Devine: But it was a daft decision to abolish the local enterprise boards, was it not?
Ms Mathieson: I do not think I am qualified to answer that one.
Q532 Mr Davidson: We are having this as a special session, beyond the others that we are having, because we have picked up the real importance of education and so on and we wanted to be in a position where we were hearing evidence that would allow us to make clear recommendations, so I wonder if I could just come back to you, Mr Sweeney. One of the points that Iain White particularly makes in his written submission is that "the success of a school is determined by more than attainment as indicated by exam results, eg, by wider pupil achievements and leaver destination statistics". How do we get from here to there, as it were? What are the steps that you believe should be taken in order to change the present concepts that the Inspectorate and others work under? If you cannot think it all through just now on your feet, maybe we could have a note afterwards; that would be helpful.
Mr Sweeney: I will try and do it for you just now. I do think that the kind of school we have come up with is perhaps a role model for others to follow where you have got this 60/40 mix of the vocational and academic or 70/30, whatever the percentage is. I also think that certain controlling interests in the education sector have got to back off and ease up, by which I mean the Inspectorate, because they lean on the education authority, they lean on the Education Department who lean on the schools and everybody has got to fit into little boxes in the traditional way, but in the 21st Century the traditional way does not work anymore. We live in a world where people do not leave school and go into the same job for ever and ever, but people chop and change, things move very fast, and I think education has got to have a new way of doing things in order to adapt to that, and I do think that the model we have in our school is going some way certainly to addressing the needs or our young people in a fast-changing Govan. As to leaver destinations, our programme is not yet fully in place, but it is already showing some statistical evidence that it is working. In 2005, 32% of our leavers went into unemployment, and I am being quiet just to let that sink in. That is a third of our leavers who went into unemployment. By last year, by doing the kinds of things that we do, we had that stat down to 21%. Next year, we are hoping for 12% and we are aiming at zero. The way we are doing that is by making school a place that the youngsters want to come to because they see a point in coming to it.
Q533 Mr Davidson: I understand the skill element of it, but the difficulty I have is that, in a scenario where we have got the Scottish target being 55% of school-leavers at higher and further education and the Inspectorate having this perspective, anything that you do is spitting into the wind in a sense because the overall, as it were, cultural, professional climate is hostile to that.
Mr Sweeney: Yes, it is hard.
Q534 Mr Davidson: What would be the most appropriate recommendations for us to be making that might help change that mindset?
Mr Sweeney: I would like to see this Committee make a recommendation that everybody involved at every level in education in Scotland values the vocational equally with the value that is placed on the academic. This stat you just quoted of about 55% going into higher education, whoever thought that up is a nutcase. Society does not need 55% university graduates. Society is crying out for plumbers. Try and get an electrician and, if you want a plumber, they are all Polish nowadays because Britain does not produce plumbers or electricians or builders or slaters or tilers anymore. We have got it wrong in that regard.
Q535 Mr Davidson: I understand your point about parity of esteem in education, but what I am not clear about is how do we move from where we are to there? The 55% target is a reflection of our inequality of esteem. How do we move? Do you give the Inspectorate a new target? Is it new targets that should be given? What exactly do we say ought to be seriously considered by the Scottish Executive?
Mr Sweeney: I am going to answer that in a slightly roundabout way, if you do not mind. I did a study visit last year to South Australia where I spent time working with their education department and in several different schools. South Australia is streets ahead of us in vocational education and they do not have an inspectorate.
Q536 Mr Davidson: They do not have an inspectorate?
Mr Sweeney: They do not have an inspectorate and, therefore, education authorities and schools have much greater autonomy and much greater control over their own destiny in everything from control of the school building down to what subjects go on the children's timetables. We are also a wee bit, in the area of vocational education, hidebound by the nanny people of health and safety. In South Australia, I saw 16-year-old kids building and selling houses at school. This was a class that did this—
Q537 Mr Davidson: I am not sure I would buy one of them!
Mr Sweeney: But to build a house, you need to use power tools. In our nanny health and safety climate, I cannot let under-16s use power tools, so how can I teach them the skills they need, so that is the kind of thing we have got to ease up on and give schools more autonomy to decide their own fate for the good of their own client group. For my client group, I need the ability to give them as wide a range of vocational choices as possible and I do not need restrictions on what I can do.
Q538 Mr Davidson: Well, if there are any other points that you think of later on which would be helpful to us to consider as recommendations, we would welcome having them in writing.
Mr Sweeney: I have one or two bits of paper I will leave with you which may answer those kinds of questions.
Q539 Ms Clark: On the Skills Development Scotland website, it says that you will "develop meaningful partnerships at national, regional and local level". What have you done so far in delivering that?
Ms Mathieson: I think you have got to remember we have only been in existence for six weeks, but there are two things I want to say here. We have kicked off a project and we have recognised that there are six key Scottish bodies that we need to align our policies with, work with and work very closely with, and they are Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the Scottish Funding Council, SQA, SCQF and the student award body, SAAS. We are kicking off a project that will be completed by the end of June to try and align all our policies so that the seven organisations, and how we interface and are aligned, are moving in the same direction, and we will be reporting in to the Scottish Government at the end of June, so, at a national level, Skills Development Scotland have been asked to take that responsibility and drive that project forward and I am part of that project. At the local level, our interim Chief Executive, Donald Henderson, has written to all community planning partnerships in Scotland, all 32 of them, to tell them that we are in existence now and that we want to have a key role at a local level because skills is a very local issue and the responses are now just coming back in. Sometimes, there is a very strong relationship already and it really depends, I suppose, on how in the past Scottish Enterprise did its business at a local level, but we are getting responses back now and we are considering how we, as Skills Development Scotland, should work with each of the 32 community planning partnerships. Now, that is quite a challenge as well, so we are trying to work through some of how that will actually happen.
Ms Hutton: The other thing I would add to that is that there is also another project which will kick off shortly which is about looking at the delivery model for Skills Development Scotland because there is always a tension between national, local and regional delivery, so it is about trying to get the balance right. Obviously, we previously worked for Scottish Enterprise and they cover the whole of Scotland, excluding the Highlands and Islands area, so we have to make sure that we are meeting local needs, meeting rural needs, which are different obviously from city needs, and fitting in with things, such as the City Strategy, so we will be looking closely at the model.
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