Official Report 866KB pdf
Good morning, and welcome to the third meeting in 2025 of the Education, Children and Young People Committee. We have received apologies from Bill Kidd.
The first item on our agenda is an evidence session with members of the Scottish Youth Parliament. We will hear from Ellie Craig, who is chair of the SYP and member for Glasgow Cathcart; Beinn Grant, who is member of the Scottish Youth Parliament for Perthshire South and Kinross-shire; Beau Johnston, who is MSYP for Edinburgh Central; Sophie Kerrigan, who is deputy convener of the SYP education and lifelong learning committee and MSYP for Stirling; and Jordana Rae, who is convener of the SYP education and lifelong learning committee and MSYP for Cowdenbeath. I warmly welcome you all to the Scottish Parliament and to our committee. We are looking forward to hearing your views and opinions and your responses to our questions.
Ellie, I know that you would like to make an opening statement.
Good morning, and thank you, convener, for inviting us to join the committee today. As you said, I am chair of the Scottish Youth Parliament, and I am delighted to be joined by my fellow members Jordana, Sophie, Beau and Beinn.
The previous Presiding Officer signed the first partnership between our two Parliaments, and I was delighted that, since being elected, the current Presiding Officer has decided to continue that partnership. Core to the aims of our partnership is the embedding of the views of children and young people in the work of the Scottish Parliament. I hope that today will be a shining example of that.
The Scottish Parliament voted unanimously to incorporate the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—the UNCRC—into Scots law, signalling that we live in a country that believes in the rights of children and young people. The importance of that step should not be understated. Children and young people who are growing up today should know that their rights matter and are taken seriously by the people in power. This week, the first case using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024 was shared by the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland—so we can see the tangible impact that the act is having.
However, when the bill was first debated, we said that the aim was to make Scotland the best country in the world to grow up in. As important as incorporation is, children and young people in Scotland face significant challenges, and those challenges prevent that aim from being the case. I hope that we can discuss many of those today.
Clearly, our education system is not meeting the needs of the young people who are in it. Young people face a mental health crisis that has been exacerbated by a pandemic, without the support that they need. Young women, LGBT young people, young people of colour, young people with disabilities and many more face targeted discrimination. It is increasingly difficult for young people to find support outside school, given that youth work services are under pressure. We feel unsupported to tackle the current climate crisis. Child poverty continues to undermine attempts to address those challenges.
All of those are human rights issues. One reason why we have failed to address them is because, too often, decision makers do not understand the experiences of the children and young people who are impacted by the decisions that they make. As MSYPs, we try to fill that gap. Decision makers need to meaningfully engage with young people to genuinely understand the challenges that they face and to prioritise and invest in the solutions that best fit.
I hope that today’s evidence session gives insight into our views and the views of our constituents. However, I encourage you not to leave it at that but to consider where else in your role you take decisions that affect young people, and how you consider our views in those spaces.
That is an excellent opening statement, and I know that it covers a lot of areas that members want to come in on.
How do you set your priorities for the SYP and for the education and lifelong learning committee for the year ahead? How does that work? How do you form the views of the members and set your priorities for the year ahead?
I can kick off on the priorities overall, then pass to Jordana to speak on behalf of the education committee.
SYP is the democratically elected voice of Scotland’s young people. We hold elections every two years, whereby tens of thousands of young people from across Scotland vote for who they want to represent them. All SYP policy is supported by consultation with young people, primarily through youth work organisations but also through schools, colleges, universities and other networks that we can access. However, cuts to youth work services affect our ability to do our role effectively, especially at local and grass-roots levels.
This year, we have three main priorities, which we will get into. Those are youth work, mental health and gender-based violence. Every two years, MSYPs consult their constituents on issues from our national manifesto, then the top three issues that are voted on form our three national campaigns. It is all based on consultation with young people.
As the convener of the education and lifelong learning committee, I meet members of the committee monthly to get an idea of what they have been doing in their constituencies and to see whether they need help or support with anything that they are trying to do. Perhaps they are not being listened to or they have an idea but do not know where to start. Sophie Kerrigan, as the deputy convener, and I look at their ideas and say, “This is how we can help”, “Who have you got in touch with?” and things like that.
During sittings of the Parliament, the committee holds sessions that are similar to this one. We do activities and have debates to get an understanding of what everyone is thinking and feeling. Our most recent session went very well, I would say—it was probably our best one. Many of our members really enjoyed it, and they felt that their views were being heard. We take what we get from all that to places such as this, so that we can share not just the views of our own constituents but views from across Scotland in general about how people feel about education provision in their own areas. We cannot know personally how it is in all the different areas.
We usually get our members to vote—for example, on the cuts to higher education, the negatives, how we can better the situation and what we need to address it. Sophie and I put together statistics, and we went to the Scottish Parliament sitting last year to speak about that in front of everyone. I will pass over to Sophie, who can talk more about the mental health side of our work.
The issue that we chose to focus on was access and cuts to further and higher education. At our most recent sitting, we brought to the table a motion that said that we obviously disapproved of the cuts. In our session, we talked about which groups are affected and how they are affected. One thing that we brought away from the session was why the cuts are coming about. We understand that, but we truly believe that some things for certain groups should not be cut. That is basically what we talked about in the motion.
One of the issues that we currently debate quite a lot in Parliament is the rise in the number of cases of violence in schools. Are you looking at that, either as a committee or more widely as a Parliament?
Yes, we—and, in particular, I—have been involved a fair bit in discussing that. At the start, the discussions were quite concerning, especially the use of the word “violence”, which has an undertone of blaming children and young people rather than looking at the factors involved.
Violence is more of a symptom of the issue rather than the issue at stake. I do not think that it is a coincidence that it has potentially increased, given that there have been cuts to youth work funding—it has not come out of the blue. However, the discussion has taken a nicer step forward, and we have been looking at rights and a rights-based approach to the issue in particular. Ellie Craig and I took part in an event with Laura Lundy at the University of Strathclyde, in which we talked about the issue and taking a proportionality-based approach, rather than setting each other’s rights—the rights of teachers and those of young people—against each other.
In our view, youth work is a big part of the solution. It provides early intervention support for young people who face difficult circumstances, as well as friendships and one-to-one relationship-based support. However, funding cuts are damaging the sector’s ability to support young people. It is vital that we treat the problems themselves, such as youth work budget cuts and an education system that does not properly engage young people because it is not designed to suit them, rather than focus on the violence or behaviour itself.
Beinn Grant, can I bring you in at this point? I represent a very rural region in the Scottish Parliament; other members represent urban constituencies or regions. You represent Perthshire South and Kinross-shire, which is more rural. How does that rural-urban split play out in the Scottish Youth Parliament? Is there any concern that rural issues are perhaps not prioritised, or do you feel that there is enough coverage of those points?
It is quite the contrary, really. I think that, at the SYP, we do a good job of getting a wide spread of members from across the country. Obviously, each Scottish Parliament constituency equates to two Scottish Youth Parliament constituency members. At our most recent sitting in this Parliament, we had a conversation regarding the provision of Gaelic language education. There was a significant amount of conversation specifically around access to education in rural communities, including Gaelic education, among other topics such as ferries, access to the internet and all sorts. Those are pressing rural issues that we take seriously.
We acknowledge that the central belt often has a lot more Government attention as regards development. With regard to the rural side, however, I think that the SYP does a good job of bridging that gap and representing all areas.
I certainly see that locally with the MSYPs that we have across the Highlands and Islands.
There is a final question from me. Ellie, you mentioned in your opening statement that there should be meaningful engagement with young people. Is that an indication that you think that there is engagement but it could go further? Do you think that the engagement that you currently have from political parties and Governments is at a suitable level?
Over the past few years, we have done a lot to improve our engagement with children and young people, especially with the culture change around the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and what that means specifically with regard to article 12. MSYPs have been campaigning on that since the Scottish Youth Parliament was created, and it is important that we continue to evaluate how we do participation and get feedback from young people involved to try to make it stronger.
We are definitely getting better in various areas—we will go on later to talk about our work on education and how we are engaged in that process. Across the board, we are definitely improving; the next stage now in implementing the UNCRC is to ensure that there is consistency in how young people are meaningfully engaged.
We have been doing a lot of work on that throughout our the Right Way project. The Scottish Government funded us to create a hub of resources for decision makers and duty bearers to use when they are consulting with young people on how to make that meaningful. We were getting asked the same questions over and over again about how we consult young people. We have all the answers, but we have finally been able to create that hub and strengthen the information that we can give.
We still have a long way to go, but we have definitely made progress.
On the back of what Ellie Craig said, to go back to the point about behaviour in schools, there is a real need to engage more with children and young people. I feel like, in spaces such as these, I have been one of the only young people there. I am there to speak for other young people, which is not necessarily the most meaningful participation, because I cannot speak on behalf of all Scotland’s young people.
Another point about behaviour in schools is the need to engage and consult with children and young people to properly understand the situation. The issue has not been brought to us at the Scottish Youth Parliament, so we are not necessarily able to speak on it or say that it has presented itself as a big issue for children and young people. However, if action is being taken on it, children and young people must be meaningfully involved in those decisions.
Yes—absolutely.
We go to Willie Rennie.
To follow up on that point, Beau, when you said that the issue has not been brought to the Scottish Youth Parliament, are you referring to the issue of violence or behaviour? That is quite interesting, because we get a lot about that. We hear from a lot of parents and young people who have been on the receiving end of some of that behaviour, and from families who are feeling let down by a system that is not supporting their young people. I am surprised that you have not had that issue come up. Why do you think that that is?
It is probably just because a lot of young people come to us with underlying issues. In saying that the issue has not been brought to us, we are not denying that it happens, of course. It is probably more that young people come to us to say that they are not able to access their local youth club or to access mental health support, for example, and those are some of the most prevalent factors underlying such behaviour. A lot of young people come to us with the underlying issue rather than the symptom. That is why those issues are two of our key campaigns this year.
MSPs represent constituencies of a similar size to yours; you have a subset of our constituents. We do the job full time, and we find it difficult to fully engage with all our constituents all the time. Often, those who do not speak up are the ones to whom we most need to listen. What kind of support do you have to engage with young people to ensure that the views of those who do not speak up are actually heard? How do you do that?
09:45
We are all volunteers, so we do not really have the capacity or resource to hold surgeries in the same way that an MSP or MP would do, but we are supported in our local authorities or national voluntary organisations by youth workers—usually people working in community learning and development teams—who have connections into the schools and youth groups around the constituencies and in the local authority areas. They are our points of contact for connecting with young people. We also build a network and base around people who run youth clubs and various other organisations to ensure that we are reaching a variety of young people in the constituency. We link in with local young carers centres and things such as care-experienced groups that are involved with the Promise champions to ensure that we have different networks and routes in.
MSYPs make sure that they can consult in a variety of ways, and there are various checkpoints with young people. Before our national sittings, we have a list of issues that we are going to talk about, and MSYPs go out and consult on those issues. That consultation can be as simple as running a poll on social media or conducting a survey. It is really about giving young people a variety of ways to access you and making yourself accessible as a representative.
I was just going to say the same as Ellie Craig. We are all volunteers and we are all in education or have jobs and so on, so we do not necessarily have the same time that an MSP would have to run surgeries and things. However, we are in a unique position: we are children and young people, which means that other children and young people probably feel that we are more approachable. We also understand better their needs in terms of coming to a place that suits them at a time that suits them and making sure that the participation is more meaningful. That means that we do not hold events during the school day, and that we hold them in youth clubs where young people feel a bit more at ease and that they are in a safer environment. Obviously, however, that relies heavily on youth work services.
Good morning. Thank you for joining us today. Ellie Craig mentioned the Promise champions. The Promise was set out by the independent care review in 2020 and is meant to be kept by 2030. How are Scottish Youth Parliament members involved in progressing that agenda and implementing the Promise?
We have MSYPs in Who Cares? Scotland. I asked what they thought about the issue, because, obviously, it is a matter of first-hand experience for them and we should be using their voice to advocate for them. Basically, they said that advocacy is the number 1 priority that they took from the Promise. Advocacy helps care-experienced young people to have their views heard and valued in decisions that affect them directly. More importantly, it ensures that their rights are not violated early on.
Ensuring that advocacy is a right in the proposed bill on the Promise would help all local authorities to ensure a proportionately adequate amount of advocacy, so that there is no postcode lottery, especially with all the cuts that we are currently seeing.
Ensuring that advocacy is independent ensures that the advocate for the care-experienced young person is independent from the decision maker and the family. They should act only on behalf of the care-experienced young person, and should do so if that person feels alone or scared to speak up or in circumstances in which they feel that they cannot talk to anyone.
Ensuring that the right to advocacy is lifelong means that the care-experienced young person will not age out of it, recognising that they might need extra support in life in relation to housing, funding or the development of a genuine sense of belonging.
Has your organisation been involved in the development of the bill? It is likely to be presented to MSPs ahead of the summer recess.
We have had some engagement, but we always advocate for the most engagement on issues such as this to be done with young people who have lived experience.
On the work that we have done nationally, we have hosted a consultation workshop, engaging with the team that is working on the bill and getting young people’s views from a national perspective. Of course, the bill team had already engaged with young people with lived experience.
The MSPs from Who Cares? Scotland have been involved in running those types of workshops for us. We still have on-going involvement, as it is an issue that affects our constituents, but it is not our main issue, because we do not feel that it is our place to have the biggest stake in that.
That is an important point. On the engagement, it has not been easy to ensure that those people’s voices are heard.
In your opening statement, you mentioned the UNCRC. What impact has the incorporation of the UNCRC had on children and young people so far? You mentioned the Right Way project. I do not know a huge amount about that or about what people are asking for with regard to a framework for the delivery of the UNCRC. Could you say more about what that includes?
MSYPs have been campaigning on the UNCRC since the beginning of the SYP. I started to campaign on it when I got involved in the SYP about five and a half years ago. Before then, I had never really heard of the UNCRC and I did not know about my rights under it. That is the case for a lot of young people.
Now that there has been a culture shift in Scotland, children and young people know about their rights from a younger age. That is one of the biggest impacts of the legislation: it raises awareness and tells children and young people that their rights matter.
The previous Children and Young People’s Commissioner, Bruce Adamson, has said that children and young people should not be in the courtroom. That is a last stage of recourse. What we want is for adults to respect children and young people’s rights.
I mentioned the Right Way project, which specifically focuses on article 12 of the UNCRC and on meaningful participation. The project has a website: a group of young rights champions came together and created resources to support participation processes, based on their lived experience of meaningful participation. We also did some research into some of the Scottish Government’s policy areas to look at how participation should work in them.
We are currently in phase 2 of that project, and we are updating those resources, doing more research, and doing an upward mentoring scheme with directors in the Scottish Government. We are trying to create a culture change from the top level of decision making, because we think that we need to set an example at the highest level of decision making if we want it to feed down and to bring about a culture shift across Scotland.
Maybe you could share those resources with us once they have been updated so that we can see for ourselves what is being provided.
I want to return to the questions that the convener and Willie Rennie asked. For all of us committee members, there is real cross-party concern about school environments in general and the violence that is often reported to us. What surveying has been done since the pandemic about where young people are at? How are you feeding into that?
I have had several meetings with different organisations that have described that there is a very challenging situation for many young people now—young people who are picking how long they want to stay at school and sometimes just wandering school corridors. Obviously, they are disaffected with their learning environment following the pandemic. How is your organisation capturing young people’s solutions for some of that problem that could feed into the work that we are doing and the plans that local authorities have been tasked with putting together?
I can come in first on that question then maybe pass it to the others, if they have something relevant to add.
All the issues that we have been campaigning on are linked to the school environment. Our three campaigns are on youth work, gender-based violence and mental health. Those three issues are so linked to the education environment.
Mental health is a really big issue, and I will let Sophie Kerrigan talk about that in a minute. The pandemic exacerbated existing issues in young people’s mental health, and, since then, I do not think that they have recovered from the isolation that they faced.
We keep saying that cuts to youth work services are really detrimental with regard to those issues. We need support in place for young people. Maybe the school environment, as it currently is, is not fit for a lot of young people; we need to have qualified youth workers and CLD workers to support those young people so that they can still achieve their full potential—whether or not that is in an education setting.
We have spoken to our constituents in general about education, which is something that we are always consulting on. It is a very hot topic for young people, as I am sure that you can imagine. We know that they do not feel that they have agency in their school environment. A lot of that is not prioritised because there is a lot of pressure on them in exams, qualifications and tests. Most schools have student councils and youth voice networks of some kind, but the feedback on how meaningful those can be is very mixed—which is not to mention the fact that they are not really seen as a priority because young people have highers and other exams and qualifications to worry about.
We need to prioritise giving young people skills such as leadership and teamwork so that not only can we make the school environment fit for young people, but they feel that they have agency and control. Agency comes up in relation to a number of issues, such as access to period products and school toilets. There are so many issues that may be linked to behaviour in schools, but that are actually more linked to children and young people’s basic human rights.
Does anyone else want to come in on that?
Ellie mentioned our mental health campaign, which I am part of. Basically, we are aiming to promote and create good mental health training and educational resources for teachers and young people.
As Miles Briggs said, after Covid, we faced a massive issue as a society and in education. I went through Covid at the ages of 11 and 12. I am 17 now, and I am facing my advanced highers and highers. I went back into school facing my national 5s. My year was the first ever year not to get any hints about the exam papers, which I thought was completely unnecessary, and there was a backlash against it.
On violence in education and in schools, we have a group of teachers at my school—McLaren high school in Callander—who are looking at violence in schools. We are trying to take steps, such as restricting mobile phone use, to ensure that social media is not one of the factors that are affecting the violence.
In SYP, we probably campaign about social media in every meeting; in the education and lifelong learning committee it comes up every time that we meet. It is a massive issue for young people, which they face every day, and there is a backlash against it.
I will pass on to somebody else to say a little bit more about that.
On the back of what Ellie and Sophie have said, I do not think that it is a coincidence that the subjects of our three national campaigns have been selected at the same time that you are noticing that violence is on the rise.
We also have our campaign on gender-based violence. We have been looking at how to improve legislation to end gender-based violence. That includes making misogyny a hate crime and incorporating a gender-mainstreaming approach in all policy processes. Therefore, when you look to create policy, a key part of that process would be, from the very start, to think about the impact that it will have on gender-based violence, as a lot of people will be discriminated against if we do not consider that.
Another aspect is the need to improve education on and understanding of microaggressions in order to create healthier and safer working and school environments. Off the back of youth work, for example, my school had support for a learning base that incorporated youth workers from the local community. If we increase funding to youth work or at least secure the current funding, we will be able to tackle that more directly in a way that better helps young people.
Fundamentally, we are talking about a polycrisis in the system. We have faced years of real-terms cuts to the national health service, youth work and community services. We are seeing a degradation of community services all round. When that happens, obviously, services are diminished and the inevitable result is that the education sector has to pick up the slack. Of course we must look at the symptoms of the problems, but we at SYP are trying to look at the root causes of why those issues are issues and what tangible steps we can take to resolve them.
Ellie mentioned agency in schools. We know that the situation with student councils varies a lot, so this is not necessarily an issue everywhere, but in many schools young people do not feel like they have a choice in what they are doing. We have an exam system that was set up in the 1880s and has barely changed since. From the ages of five to 17, we live in a system that is dictated by bells and timetables, with pupils having very little say in the matter. In recent months, I have heard a lot about policing by consent, but why do we never talk about education by consent? After all, education is where we spend the majority of our lives until the age of 18.
We need to think long and hard about pupils’ mental health in school and the effects of education. Frankly, a two-year waiting list for child and adolescent mental health services is not acceptable. If someone is having to wait two years for an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnosis and however many years for an autism diagnosis but they cannot get support in mainstream education, it is no wonder that they start to feel alienated and cannot cope in school. That is not the fault of the kids or the teachers—it is the fault of the system.
I want to ask Sophie about social media and mental health. I would have hated to have been a young person in the social media age. I probably would not want the world to fling back in my face some of the things that I might have said when I was 16 or 17. I will use the example of Mhairi Black. When she was 16, she said that she hated maths. Ironically, her mother and father were maths teachers—maybe that is why she hated it. She did not think that she was going to be an MP when she was 21. All the things that she said on social media came back to haunt her later on.
Does that extra challenge for young people have an effect? There is the whole idea of someone being a young person but also trying to deal with the world, and there is now social media on which people say all kinds of things. Do you guys deal with that issue quite a lot?
10:00
Absolutely—there is no answer other than that. Nowadays, society is driven by social media such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. It is an astronomically impossible issue to tackle, because it is not like we can cancel all Snapchat and Instagram accounts. Nowadays, especially in an educational environment, the main contact with your peers is through your phone. When you want to hang out with somebody, you have to text them; unfortunately, you do not walk up to their door to ask whether they want to play in the street anymore.
You would never have heard me say that. [Laughter.]
That is what I used to do when I was a little kid and running about.
Nowadays, with social media, there is the pressure to act like somebody who you are not. In schools—as the SYP’s education committee has talked about many times—the majority of bullying happens on a screen either through social media on your phone or through texting random people you will never know.
Social media is such an unsafe place that education should cover it as a topic, because young people truly do not know what they are getting into when they press the button to accept those terms and conditions. However, it is an impossible issue to tackle.
From our perspective, some of the abuse that we, as MSPs, get is pretty brutal, but we are all full-grown adults and as grown up as we are ever going to be. I have more people on mute on Twitter than just about anything else, because I cannot be bothered to listen to their nonsense. However, when you are young and just trying to make your way in the world, that will really affect you. Is the Scottish Youth Parliament doing any projects in that regard?
We run a project called Mind Yer Time—it is in quite a late phase now; we have run it a few times—which is a resource to help young people to be mindful of their social media and screen time. There are different resources to help them to manage that time, because, as you said, social media can have such an impact on young people’s mental health and can exacerbate existing bullying issues. We hear that all the time. It used to be that, if you were being bullied, it would be in school, but now it follows you everywhere. Young people see that happening. It must be difficult for teachers and other professionals in schools to adequately support young people, because they have access to social media when they go home and, if stuff happens outside of school, it can be really difficult to manage that.
Young people face challenges not only on their own social media. They see the culture of social media and how things unfold on it, and they see the way in which adults treat one another on social media. As a young woman in politics, I think about the way in which women in politics are talked about in the media and about the hate that all politicians get. I am sure that you all know that it can be quite a toxic environment, which can be quite off-putting for young people who might be interested in getting involved in those spaces.
It is somewhat undialectical to assume that we can suddenly get rid of phones and technology. Obviously, the cat is already out of the bag, so we have to figure out ways in which we can work with social media and with children to get around such issues.
Ellie Craig mentioned the Mind Yer Time campaign and other ways in which the SYP and society as a whole are grappling with the issues. It is true that, on average, children spend more time on their screens than they do in education. That is a massive issue, so we have to look at why education itself is not interesting or as appealing and why people spend so much time on their phones. We have to think of ways to integrate social media and technology with education, use a more holistic model and find better ways to educate people of the dangers of social media and long-term screen use.
On the back of what Ellie Craig and Beinn Grant have said, our Mind Yer Time project is youth led, as is all our work. The best thing about that is that resources are being created for young people by young people.
As Beinn Grant said, we need to look at why the education system is not engaging people. Is it out of date? I argue that it potentially is. Does it include young people? Do they have agency to create their own education system? If not, why not?
On social media and mobile phones, there is a need to engage with children and young people to properly understand the situation—including, for example, policies on mobile phones in school. Reasons why young people might need phones in school are being missed. For example, I get a lot of important phone calls to do with hospital when I am in school. If I miss them, that means that I am denied my right to know about my healthcare. There is a need to engage with young people generally to consult on the issue.
On what Beinn Grant and Beau Johnston said about the education system, I feel your pain. I was educated in the 1970s and 1980s and I felt that it was like a prison. When I was 16, the teachers gladly opened the door as I walked out of the place. It was basically like that for pupils. It is interesting to hear that you think similarly and that young people think that way now.
What ideas do you have? We hear about that issue from stakeholders in education, but nobody seems to do anything about it. We always say that it is a landscape with many stakeholders and everybody has an opinion on it, so it becomes difficult to make any changes. What key changes would you guys make?
As SYP and as young people, we have been involved in a number of discussions throughout the years regarding education. All the way back in 2021, I convened the education committee at the Scottish Youth Parliament and was involved with the independent review of qualifications and assessment with Professor Hayward. SYP was heavily involved with the national discussion on education and the learner panel, which Ellie Craig will come on to in a minute.
In the independent review of exam reform with Louise Hayward, we looked at models across the world and came to a striking conclusion about what the issues are in education in Scotland and some fundamental aspects that have to change to allow it to thrive. It is true that it does not thrive currently. We seem to have an obsession with trying to hammer square pegs into circular fittings when it comes to education in this country. We have a system that is geared towards 10 per cent of students and does not work for the majority. It is about time that we recognised that.
Professors Campbell and Harris spoke to 38,000 people. I can say with confidence that, in the Hayward review, we spoke with several thousand practitioners, young people and other stakeholders across the country. As well as the learner panel, we consulted a host of young people.
Therefore, what young people think about education is clearly documented. There are masses of reports and documents to state that. We have seen time and again that education is failing young people and that education in Scotland is not performing as well as it should or could. Some of the ideas were already outlined in the Hayward review and in the national discussion. It is about time that were bold and started enacting some of them and following some of the recommendations that were made through massive consultation with the whole country, including thousands of young people.
If it is okay, we will quickly jump back to social media, because Miles Briggs and Ross Greer have questions on that.
Most mental health charities are outlining that we need to try to get people off phones and social media. Given the Australian Government’s recent decision, has the SYP taken any view on that matter and the message of getting off devices? How do we facilitate that in Scotland?
We have not done robust consultation with young people on their opinions on banning social media. However, through our Mind Yer Time project, we want young people to be empowered to make their own decisions about their social media use and about managing and being mindful of their screen time. If the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government explore banning social media, young people need to be at the centre of that discussion.
Sophie Kerrigan mentioned the importance of learning about and discussing social media in school. That reminded me that, nine years ago, the committee took evidence on that as part of a review of personal and social education, which was a long-running Youth Parliament campaign that we implemented.
A key part of that was the idea that PSE in schools should be co-designed by young people so that it was relevant to them. Social media was the specific reason for that. Feedback from teachers said that they often were not on the same platforms as young people, or that, if they were, the algorithms were showing them something totally different.
Eight years ago, Education Scotland decided that PSE would be co-designed by young people. At that time you were all at school: most of you are still at school now, or were there recently. Was that your experience? Did you have an opportunity to co-design PSE and to talk about topics like social media?
At the start of my SYP journey I took part in a workshop about PSE lessons. I am so happy that you have mentioned that subject. Last week, the pupil parliament in my school started a project to co-design our PSE classes. There is a curriculum that you need to hit that includes sex education, drugs and stuff like that—you would not believe how many lessons I have had on alcohol use. However, there has been nothing on how important advocacy is in my life. Many people my age do not know how to do stuff like taxes—they think that it is so boring—and how to take the next step in life or how to budget.
PSE lessons definitely need to be co-designed. As Ellie Craig said, young people need to be at the centre of that. It is our education, and we are currently in the education system, so we should have a say. That work should be led not by 70-year-olds who were in education decades ago, but by the young people who are our future. We need to give them a toolbox of core skills that they will need if they are to live successful and positive lives once they are outside the education environment.
There is a disproportionate implementation gap on such matters. Across schools, there are differences in terms of how youth-led pupil parliaments are. In some it is very tokenistic, but in others it is brilliant. Then situation is very varied.
Agency and co-design need to be applied much more broadly than just in PSE. They need to be in the education system in general—whether that be young people choosing the texts that they study in English, to make them more modern and engaging or, as Beinn Grant said, their taking part in the independent review group that he was part of. That definitely needs to be looked at more, because there are such discrepancies in schools’ approaches.
I echo what Beau Johnston said. There are massive gaps across the country.
To be completely honest with you, I point out that during my time in high school, which was a few years ago now, I did not receive much in the way of PSE. I was taught about puberty when I was in primary 6, then there was a gap until about secondary 4 before we had sex education or anything of that sort again.
That experience has been echoed, certainly among the people whom I have spoken to across Perth and Kinross and by other MSYPs, who have expressed similar concerns. Some schools do a very good job of implementing PSE and teaching pupils about world issues, but others are completely failing in their responsibility to deliver PSE properly.
That partly goes back to what we have mentioned about youth work and community services being cut. The PSE curriculum is often taught by guidance teachers. They are having to pick up more and more work and to look after students who should be receiving specialist care from the national health service or support in schools from additional support teams and so on. Instead, that burden is falling on class teachers and guidance teachers, which reduces the time that they have available to teach PSE properly.
I have seen very little being taught on agency, either in PSE or in school subjects in general. Many schools have some form of article 12 group or student council. However, those often lack staff backing due to time constraints. Senior management sometimes does not give them enough space and scope to effect meaningful change or to discuss tangible issues in the school environment. As I have said, though, experiences vary a lot across the country.
Jordana, has your committee looked at that, or would it do so in the future? If there is good practice that is not being shared across the country, would that be of interest to members of your committee?
It has not been fully mentioned in our face-to-face committee meetings, but it is occasionally brought up in video calls.
In my constituency of Cowdenbeath, I have held a few consultations that are about how high schools are specifically getting young people’s views on anything that they do. My school, Inverkeithing high school, in particular is relatively bad at getting young people involved.
10:15We recently got a new headteacher, and everyone has been told not to post negative things on social media. Before I even came to the school, people said, “Don’t talk to him—just don’t.” I had to ask deputies for boards and registration notices to get consultations out to people, and it got to the point where I just went to the headteacher’s door.
We have made a lot of progress, and he really wants young people to be involved. We are trying to include youth councils in the work, but our school, like many in Fife, does not have a youth council. There is no proper group; it is more that those of us who are MSYPs—there are a few in Kirkcaldy—come together with support ambassadors from schools and say, “Right—there’s this issue, and there’s that issue.”
We are trying to create a group, and we have sent things out in my school to ask who is interested in having their voices heard, and that sort of thing. We have actually had a lot of people reply, which surprised many of the deputies because they had never asked them. Now loads of people are taking the opportunity to say anything that they can.
After this meeting, I will probably be going into more schools in Fife—not just my own—because although there are youth councils in many schools across all of our areas, including Fife, a lot of them involve older people saying what they think the councils should do, and they do not understand why parents and young people are angry about what they sometimes do.
It is not so much the case that we speak about PSE in education committee meetings, but it is brought up occasionally, because we all have to go through it during our education.
Thank you very much. I will bring Beinn in. I am conscious of the time, but you are all giving very good answers.
To add a wee bit of context, I point out that the education committee, when I was convening it, ran quite a lot of consultations on PSE. As Ross Greer mentioned, it was one of the SYP’s fundamental campaigns a few years ago.
We have since somewhat shifted our focus away from PSE as a single issue towards the education system as a whole. As I mentioned when I was involved in the work with the independent review group and Louise Hayward, the SYP recognises that PSE is an area in which there has to be reform—other points on that have been mentioned in relation to the SYP’s campaigns—but it is seen as one aspect under the wider umbrella of the massive educational reforms that we need. That has been the education committee’s more central focus, recently.
Good morning. I was going to ask you how much say children and young people have on the culture, policies and options of schools, but from what I am hearing, the answer—I do not want to answer for you—seems to be, “Not an awful lot.”
What are the barriers to being heard, and how could we, as a society, get rid of them?
Unfortunately, as we have said, providing agency and choice to young people in schools often ends up being a tokenistic afterthought.
My experience, and that of a lot of young people in Perth and Kinross, is that schools half-heartedly implement some sort of rights-respecting school programme, article 12 group or student council that does not have any power, which does not give young people the capacity to effect change.
Oftentimes, management decisions are made behind closed doors by the senior management team. The teachers have little say in how schools are run and, if that is the case, you can forget about the students getting a say in matters. People have an odd kind of disciplinarian stance towards schools at the moment, and they hammer square pegs into circular holes. We need to recognise that young people have a voice and that they have valid concerns and criticisms of the system, but there is no scope for them to voice those concerns because of how the system is currently set up.
As I said, we have lived with an outdated exam system for a very long time. On the barriers, the priority in schools is to cram and memorise for exams and high-stakes tests, so that schools can score better in the league tables. I remember the school inspector coming round when I was still in high school a few years ago, and we were encouraged to mention certain things about eco-committees and so on in order to spin a false narrative that education in Scotland is somehow wonderful, when in actuality it is not.
Was it the teachers who asked you to do that?
Yes. There was an expectation at that time, and the culture in the school was that we should toe the line. There was a conflation of respect and deference, and within the school there was not much scope for students to actually be heard and listened to.
You mentioned education by consent. Will you explain for an auld yin how that would work, or how you would like to see it working?
Yes. With UNCRC incorporation, it is all well and good for people to be seen to be implementing human rights, but it is an entirely different matter to actually implement them. Thus far, we have seen examples of attempts to start student councils and youth voices. Across the board, there have been some really good organic attempts on the part of young people to create youth forums. We recently started the process of creating a Perth and Kinross youth forum, and I know that Glasgow City Council has had a youth council for some time. There have been attempts to integrate youth voices more into the system.
The problem is that we have a system that is geared towards examinations. For a very long time, we have had the tail wagging the dog, with the Scottish Qualifications Authority dictating what is taught in schools. Even the BGE and primary years, which are supposed to be ring fenced for the broad general education and holistic education, have seen encroachment by exam rhetoric and a formulaic way of doing education. The idea is that we pour in a little bit of science and a little bit of English and—boom!—we will have the perfect model citizen. That is not how it works.
We are failing to recognise that there is a crucial human element to education that we are missing. We are all individuals. We all have to aspire and we all need to be inspired. Currently, education is not doing that, because the focus is on examinations and league tables. We are not looking fundamentally at the real issues and we are not looking at developing skills in young people. Instead, we are focusing on timetables and how we have been doing it for the past 100 years.
Beau Johnston will have more to say on the matter.
There should be a rights-based approach to education. We should take that approach to everything, now that we have the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024. It is the basis of what we do with the Right Way model. It is not only about schools, teachers and support staff, but about decision makers understanding how to meaningfully involve young people in decision making. If teachers are not aware of that, it should come from a governmental or parliamentary level.
It is about young people having space and a voice, and ensuring that they are sufficiently supported and educated on the topic that is being discussed, and that they have time to form their opinions and speak in a space that is comfortable for them. That will not necessarily be a formal environment—it might be a break-out space in school that is a bit more chilled out, or a youth club. That is where we do a lot of consulting.
It is important that young people have an audience and influence. They need people to listen to them, including the key people in the school or whatever environment they are in—the decision-makers who have influence. They need to know what impact their voice will have, and they need that to be followed up.
It is about ensuring that we have an article 12-based approach to everything, so that young people are meaningfully involved, including through their youth councils, and it is about ensuring that teachers and decision makers are well informed on children and young people’s rights before they start to implement them. Otherwise, it can become just tokenism.
With regard to young people having a voice and having all those things in place, that is brilliant for those who are already engaged but, as Willie Rennie asked earlier, what about the children and young people who are silent at the back of the classroom? How do we engage them? How do we get their voices heard, too?
The key is that, if you are doing meaningful participation correctly, that should take care of itself, a little bit. If you are adapting your methods of sharing ideas, there does not necessarily have to be a formal discussion. It can be people writing things down, but it can also be about the minute details of a meeting, such as, for example, people saying, “We’ll be getting pizza. You’ll get some free food if you come along.” People should be given incentives, but should also be told that their views will have an impact.
So many times I have been involved—I know other people who have been involved feel this—in things that end up going nowhere and it feels as though we are saying the same things over and over. I am sure that you all also experience that. People just become disengaged.
Young people need to know that what they say will have some influence, and we should look at different means of remuneration, including food, gift vouchers and that kind of thing.
I will pass over to Ellie, because she will have more to say.
It is important to note that not all young people have the capacity or want to be involved or engaged at the same level as we are. That is okay: it is about creating processes that young people can feed into at different points. Some young people might just want to fill in a survey, and not stick up their hand and talk in a room full of people, but still be able to get their views across in a way that matters to them. We were talking about space and voice, but having a voice does not necessarily mean actually using your voice. A lot of young people cannot use their voice.
It is also about working outside the school environment with young people who might be supported by an organisation to make sure that their voice is as important as that of the young person who might be able to come to the Education, Children and Young People Committee and share their views.
Three members still want to come in and we are up against the clock a little bit. It would be good if members could ask short questions and get succinct answers, if that is possible. We can go over time a little bit, but I know that the witnesses also have other things to do today.
John Mason is next.
The convener asked you about engagement, and I think it was Ellie Craig who said that there has been a bit of improvement. I want to widen the question out. If we start with the Parliament, is it unusual that five of you have been invited along to a committee for an hour, or does that happen frequently? How is engagement with the Parliament going?
As I said, we have a partnership agreement that was signed by the Presiding Officer, and it has been really successful. MSYPs are invited a lot to give evidence and are invited to events with various stakeholders in the Parliament.
At the end of October or the start of November last year, the Scottish Youth Parliament and all of its more than 150 members took over the Scottish Parliament chamber for a couple of days.
Did many MSPs come and engage with you at that time?
Yes. We held a parliamentary reception to celebrate our 25th anniversary on Halloween, and we got a really good turnout of MSPs, considering that it was Halloween. We do not need to capture everybody in one weekend, because some MSPs meet their MSYPs regularly. We also have engagement with cabinet secretaries in debates.
Another really good example of engagement with the Scottish Parliament was during the 16 days of activism. When we were here in October, we held a workshop in this committee room that informed a motion for the 16 days of activism debate in the Scottish Parliament. MSYPs who were involved in that, including me, were invited along.
You are reasonably happy with MSYPs’ involvement with the Parliament.
Yes.
The SYP and the Parliament are doing quite well. We have a good functioning relationship, but we would like this meeting to happen every year. I do not see why we cannot come back and have more discussions about education and other committee matters. MSYPs should come to you guys and give evidence frequently; this should not be a one-off occasion.
It is not just about us. For example, I used to work with groups of young carers and various other demographics from across Perth and Kinross, and at times it was a real challenge to make sure that you were feeding in that voice and all the rest of it. On a wider scale, we as MSYPs do a good job of engaging with our national voluntary organisations and youth work, and of getting those voices and views in from all parts.
What about other statutory organisations, such as the police? Do the police come to you or to the SYP to ask your opinion?
Yes. Our youth ethics advisory panel project is a group of young people who are trained on ethics and are asked by Police Scotland about ethical dilemmas on various issues—for example, artificial intelligence and lots of other subjects that young people have opinions on. We have also recently worked with them on the corporate parenting plan.
10:30
Are there any examples of organisations that never come to speak to you?
The issue is perhaps not about organisations that do not come to speak to us. We are always targeting issues that impact organisations, so we reach out to organisations. Everybody is on their own participation journey. The issue is about when we engage with organisations and that participation turns out not to be meaningful. I am aware that we have not had a chance to speak about the Education (Scotland) Bill yet, and I am sure that we will get on to that, but we could give you a few examples of tokenistic participation.
You bring in the Government. One or two of you have mentioned budget cuts, especially in education, mental health and other areas. We are in the process of scutinising the budget here. Do you have any engagement with the Government on the budget? Do you ever discuss saying to the Government, “We don’t want cuts in education. You should cut the health budget instead”? As you say, there is not a lot of education on taxes and such things. Do you discuss whether taxes should be raised, or is that political? Do you just stay away from that area?
We have an annual meeting with the Scottish Cabinet at which we raise the three top issues that young people have raised with us. On specific budgets and numbers, as young volunteers, our job is perhaps not to find the solutions or move around money but to present the issues that matter to young people and say to policymakers, “You need to act.”
The problem is that everybody comes to the Parliament and says that they want more money, and everybody says that it is not their job to say where the money should come from. From that point of view, you are very representative of society, but somebody has to get the money from somewhere.
Yes. That is why meaningful engagement is not just about young people saying, “We want this; we want that.” We implement a model that is about working together and talking through solutions. It is not about young people coming to decision makers with solutions; it is about decision makers having active conversations with young people. That is not one meeting a year, but a series of meetings.
We have had some engagement around the programme for government, and we are looking to develop that further, to make sure that we are involved earlier in the process, so that we can have that engagement and talk about the solutions. We do not want to just do a showcase speech every so often to raise issues that matter to young people, because we are clear that everybody agrees that mental health and all those things are issues. We want to work on solutions, and I do not think that it is about leaving it to them or to us; it is about having productive conversations together.
I will finish with Sophie Kerrigan. Is the question of tax and how public finances work touched on much at school?
To be honest, not really. There needs to be more education on the things that will affect us later in life, such as taxes and pensions. Young people are likely to say, “I don’t want to sit in a 50-minute class to learn about taxes.” It sounds like such a boring topic, but doing that for 50 minutes or even 20 minutes a week for a month or something would genuinely help us so much. We would be able to have a bit more control over our lives and not just be shoved out into society. As Beinn Grant said, we are put through the exam system and then pushed out into the world and left on our own. Do you know what I am saying?
Thank you for all the information that you have given us so far. I think that many of us around the table—and, in fact, many of us in the Parliament—could learn a lot from what you have said. I will be as succinct as I can be. My questions are about education reform, mental health and qualifications and opportunities. You said that involvement in education reform has been tokenistic. Will you say a bit more about that? What is your view on where it has all got to?
I will kick us off and then pass to Beinn. We are very clear that the Education (Scotland) Bill is not education reform. That is not to say that it will not do important work or that we do not need to reform education institutions, but it is a really small piece in a much wider puzzle.
On having meaningful engagement, we think that the requirements in the bill to engage with young people should be strengthened significantly. I have a few examples from reading the bill. We need to make sure that young people are specified on the learner charter and in engagement because, right now, it refers to interested people but does not specify that they need to be young people or learners.
Another issue is that of power balances and remuneration. Young people giving up their time to be involved at such a high level of decision making in a volunteer capacity while they are in full-time education represents a big commitment, and we need to make sure that we are properly rewarding them not only by taking into account their views at the same level as any other stakeholder’s, but perhaps by exploring ways to help them to get a qualification, a reward or remuneration in some other form.
Finally, it is not clear in the bill as it stands whether learners are going to be reporting directly to the committee. We need to make sure that that is going to be happening and that it is not fed through a third party or senior management.
I absolutely agree with what Ellie Craig has just said. As it stands, the bill is not going to meaningfully reform, let alone fix, our broken education system. I think that we have made that quite clear. That is not to say that it is not doing important work—of course it is, as it contains some valuable aspects that follow on from the Muir report and so on.
However, I am deeply concerned about how narrow the scope of the bill is and its somewhat vague nature with regard to how the Government intends to carry through its stated aim of building in the voices of stakeholders and young people, who are, after all, the experts in their own lives. As Ellie Craig mentioned, from reading the bill, it seems that parents will be asked to give evidence to the strategic advisory groups on behalf of learners, but it should be young people themselves who are doing that.
The requirements to engage young people meaningfully need to be significantly strengthened in the bill. As it stands, we do not believe that the provisions will deliver the necessary cultural changes to significantly influence the institutions in the way that the country and young people so desperately need.
The impact of high-stakes exams on mental health in schools should be considered more in the bill. It was clearly highlighted in the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s concluding observations, following the evidence from the children and young people in Geneva.
The recommendations that are set out in Professor Ken Muir’s report and the outcomes of the national discussion on education and the independent review of qualifications and assessments, which was carried out by Professor Hayward, myself and others, which were fed into by literally tens of thousands of young people, point out the major shortcomings of Scotland’s current educational framework. The review set out clear steps for decision makers to take in making the bold changes that are necessary to move forward with the ambitious reform that is required.
Engagement and consultation with young people should always be on-going, but it should not be used as an excuse for a delay. Over the past six years, I have asked students what they think about various aspects of the Hayward review, what the council is doing, what is going on in their high school and so on. They have whole-heartedly given me their genuine responses and have told me about their life experiences, which I have then fed back to Parliament or the council only to find out, in time, that nothing has been done with that information and that the process is simply a one-way stream. That is one of the barriers to engaging young people and learners.
There has to be a feedback loop. We have to ensure that young people are having their voices heard and acted on. It is not enough to sit here and tell you what the issues are and to talk with you about some of the solutions—we need to see action as well.
Those are some of the major issues that are playing out nationally with regard to elections. Young people are the least likely to vote in elections, but they are the most likely to participate in protests and sign a petition and are the most politically active of any age group. We have to recognise that there is a disconnect between what is happening in Parliament and in councils and what is happening on the ground in schools and in young people’s lives.
The one-way street issue that you have just described is a concern. Also, I share the views around some of the reviews that have been published and the urgent need to start implementing them.
I will move on slightly. A number of you have pointed out this morning that school is not necessarily engaging young people—I think that that is the term that Beinn Grant used. That is relevant today, because, as you know, this afternoon in the chamber, we will have a debate about the school environment and so on. I thought that the points about engaging young people were fascinating.
What options are available at school that interest young people and set them on their future career path? Do we need to change anything in that regard?
That is quite a complicated question to answer. A lot needs to change. At the moment, the whole culture of education in high schools is wrong: you sit down in rows and watch the whiteboard for 45 minutes, and then the bell rings and you disappear to another class. At no point throughout your education are you actually receiving an understanding of why you are learning what you are learning. It is all well and good to talk about the stars, but if you have not been to Our Dynamic Earth to see how that information has a practical use in reality and society, it can often seem like an arm’s-length concept. We need to do a better job of engaging with young people on why what they are learning is important.
As, I think, I have mentioned before, a dab of science, English or maths is not going to produce the perfect worker or the perfect citizen at the other end. We have to really consider the relationships that are involved in education. I, myself, would not be sitting here right now if it was not for the youth workers who supported me. I had a bit of a rocky time in high school—the system did not work well for me at all. I was excluded from school and I did not get on well.
Because of its rigid nature, the school system failed to show me why school was important. It failed me in many respects, but fundamentally it was about the lecture model, in which you sit down and learn about maths and English. Yes, that is important, but we have to recognise that there is an interpersonal relationship between students and teachers that has to be encouraged, and there have to be elements of education that come outwith the classroom. That means developing skills through things such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s award and through vocational qualifications and apprenticeships. We need to focus more on the parity of esteem between qualifications, because, right now, there is too much focus on the approach of, “You have to get an A in higher English or you’re not going to university—end of,” when that is not the be-all and end-all.
There are plenty of examples of people in my year group at school who have done fantastic things post-school. They left school at 15 or 16 with no qualifications and went on to do apprenticeships, and they have done really well in their lives outwith the education system. We need to recognise that there are aspects of how things are done in other countries, and in other areas of society, that are part of doing a really good job of raising and educating young people, but those things do not necessarily fall within the standard educational model that we currently have in the UK.
On the back of that, it is important to come back to the idea of co-designing education with young people—for example, choosing the English text that you are going to study and stuff like that.
In addition, something that came out of our SQA learner panel, and which we hope to see acted on, is the need to change the general culture in schools and education. Beinn Grant spoke about promoting alternative pathways better. In our meeting with the SQA, we spoke about how, as a student, you feel that you are forced to take particular subjects that are considered academic, such as English, maths and three sciences, in case you might want to become a doctor, whereas people are getting so much out of apprenticeships now and yet that pathway is entirely overlooked. A lot of teachers and educational practitioners in general do not have enough knowledge about it to be able to encourage young people into it. Looking at alternative pathways and increasing their prevalence for children and young people is vital.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
I will bring in John Mason at this point.
Thank you, convener. I was not necessarily expecting to come in just now, but I have a question on the point that—as we have just heard from Beinn Grant—the emphasis should not be on university alone. On the whole, are schools emphasising university too much?
Linked to that, we have four women on the panel and one guy. Is enough being done to encourage women into engineering and other subjects that women have traditionally not studied?
There are many schools in Fife that look at qualifications in the context of university. My mum, who is 36, I think, talks about how, a few years ago, when she was at school—you probably experienced this, too—the kids who stayed on were the ones who went to uni. They were the “smart” ones who studied the academic subjects. That is still a thing nowadays. If someone takes art or music, or even design and manufacture or woodwork, and then applies to university, they are sort of frowned upon compared with students who have taken maths and chemistry—all those subjects—even though, if you want to study law to become an advocate, which is considered a big thing, you can take art and music and then go to university to study law. Many universities do not want only students of chemistry and those kinds of subjects, but schools do not say that. They make it seem to the students that, if they do not take those subjects, they will not go any further compared to someone else.
Do you think that, sometimes, teachers just do not know what is happening out there?
10:45
Honestly, it depends. You sometimes get teachers who make it hard for young people. For example, maths teachers can be really good or they can be bad. I struggled with maths, as I cannot understand numbers, but I stopped going to maths classes at all because, when an art teacher came in, our maths teacher made a comment that implied that they were stupid because they were an art teacher and they could not do maths. I took art, so I was like, “I’m not even going to go.” There are also teachers who let kids expand what they are into, though a lot of the teachers who do that are more on the creative side.
Obviously, there are also teachers—for example, in the science block in my school—who make people aware that, no matter what subjects they take, they can still go to uni, get an apprenticeship or go to college. You still have those opportunities; it does not actually matter whether you took the really academic subjects.
I hope that people out there are listening carefully to all of that information, because it is really important that we offer something to the about 60 per cent of people in Scotland who do not go to university.
I want to move on to a question about mental health. You have spoken about the campaign that you are running and the work that is already on-going in schools. Can you tell me about the balance between what happens in school and the role of other services, such as CAMHS, and how that is playing out?
As well as CAHMS in schools, there are community-based mental health services. A couple of years ago, the Youth Parliament was commissioned by the Scottish Government to do a youth-led review of community-based mental health services. To the surprise of some of the young people involved, the review was overwhelmingly positive: when young people can access community-based services, those are really positive for them.
However, there is an issue with the lack of consistency across the different local authorities, and there is a postcode lottery in terms of where the services are and the extent to which they are available to young people up to the age of 25 or 18 and to different demographics of young people.
Sophie can talk more widely about some of the other stuff.
I mentioned earlier that I am part of the mental health campaign within SYP, and we have done amazing things over the past little while. For example, at the 82nd sitting of the SYP, which took place in the Scottish Parliament, I and the rest of the mental health campaign planning group ran a session alongside Change Mental Health. We encouraged it to create an idea for a resource to help those with mental health issues or those who just want to learn more about mental health. Through that exercise, it was clear that young people are passionate about talking about mental health. It is a subject that will never go away and, unfortunately, it is not something that you can just put a Band-Aid on. It is a massive priority for a majority of young people.
As Ellie mentioned earlier, we had the Cabinet takeover in late November, when we talked to the First Minister of Scotland, John Swinney and his Cabinet. I and Skye Morgan, who is the MSYP for LGBTQ Youth Scotland, met with the Cabinet and told them about our experiences of dealing with mental health issues in the school environment.
At the 82nd sitting of the SYP, I and my co-MSYP for Stirling, Zac Mickel, proposed a motion saying that the SYP believed that mental health education and training should be available in schools. That motion passed with 88 per cent support from all MSYPs, which was really amazing. I mentioned how hard it was to go back to school after Covid, after being alienated by society, and how many young people across Scotland lack the necessary skills to socialise. I also spoke about how hard it was to come straight back to exams. As I mentioned earlier, my year was the first not to receive any hints about the national 5 exams, whereas my brother was in S5 or S6 during Covid and he once said that he was handed exam grades like they were sweets—that was a fun conversation.
Two days later, after the Cabinet takeover, I took the stage at the mental health in schools conference and presented more about SYP’s work on mental health, which was very empowering. It was amazing to sit in a room with so many professional chief executive officers and teachers who were passionate about mental health.
Over the busy few months with the groups, we managed to finalise our points as being:
“Mental health education incorporated in school curriculums.
Mental health training and education for adults working with young people.
More long-term sustainable funding for mental health services.”
Mental health should not be a taboo topic any more. It needs to be not normalised but talked about, so that people feel comfortable talking about it. As you said earlier, it is important to aim for the voices at the back of the classroom, because we do not know what they are struggling with.
Are young people getting that support for mental health?
I will mention the gap between CAMHS and what happens in schools. The language around mental health is full of contradictions. We want to tell young people that their mental wellbeing matters, but they are stuck in an exam system that is to the detriment of their mental health and there are long waiting lists for mental health services. A lot of those policy areas are siloed, but young people have one lived experience of their education and their mental health, so we need to ensure that it is consistent.
I know that we are stuck for time, so I will ask two quick questions.
There has been a lot of discussion about engagement. The vast bulk of education is delivered through local authorities. I am aware of one local authority that appointed a pupil from each of its secondary schools to its statutory education committee. It tried to give them full voting rights, but it was not allowed to do so by law. Have you heard of any other councils doing that? Would it be a good idea?
Recently, I worked alongside the CEO of Perth and Kinross Council and members of its education committee regarding the creation of a new bespoke youth forum within the council that would work alongside councillors and within the communities. A much wider conversation needs to happen. Youth forums should be everywhere; there should be youth voice everywhere.
What I referred to was not a youth forum; it was young people being members of the council’s education committee.
Yes. That comes back to the point that we are volunteers. Outside of being an MSYP, I am a student nurse. I work 40 hours a week in accident and emergency at the moment. It is stressful, to say the least. I am realistic not to expect cohorts of young people to read through hours and hours of council papers on often minute matters about budgeting or whatever. It is important to engage young people where they are. If that means, when the time is appropriate, that young people get voting rights on a council, so be it. Obviously, we need to recognise that sifting through papers is not always the best use of young people’s time.
We all feel like that from time to time.
I am sure that you do.
My other question relates to the social media situation. I have not, unlike Willie Rennie, had lots of complaints about violence in schools in my constituency. I have had a lot to do with additional support needs and individual parents. However, I had two secondary 3 classes from Dunblane in Parliament recently, on the same day that the convener was asking questions about behaviour in schools.
I asked the two teachers about their experience, and they said that one of the most alarming things was the increase in misogyny. I was interested to hear somebody talk about misogyny becoming a hate crime, which I think is the Government’s intention. In particular, those teachers mentioned young men seeing Andrew Tate and repeating the stuff that he says.
Is that your experience, Beinn? I ask you first of all because you are a young man. Have the others had the same experience? Those teachers were just stunned by some of the stuff that was being said. It is like we are going backwards rather than forwards.
That speaks to the importance of critical thinking being taught in schools. It has become all too easy to scroll through Instagram and TikTok reels. I can show you right now how easy it is to flick through on my phone and sit for hours looking at those reels. The information that pops up around Andrew Tate and his soundbites about what it is to be a man is extremely toxic.
Schools and society as a whole need to do better at recognising and calling out misogyny where it exists, and better educating young men in particular about what is good and what is right. That is part of a much larger conversation that needs to be had around social media and education on how we approach that.
In my school, because we were quite a small school and there were a fair few of us who were quite politically minded, we made quite a conscious effort to do the Equally Safe at School programme. We did a lot of things with RASAC—Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre Perth and Kinross. That work was all pupil led and done because I and a number of other students in the class were unhappy with the way in which personal and social education was being run. We were unhappy with the way in which the school was dealing with issues relating to misogyny and critical thinking. To be honest, it was ignoring those issues, as though they did not exist, and it was not recognising that there is a toxic spewing of misogyny from people such as Andrew Tate and Donald Trump, who push that rhetoric. The issue is part of a wider conversation about how we teach critical thinking and what we encourage our young people to do.
On the previous point about young people being involved, it is entirely possible for them to be involved in voting and other such decisions, but that needs to be done in a meaningful way. That means ensuring that children and young people are fully informed in an accessible way. They should not have to read pages and pages of briefings; there should be easy-read versions or short summarised versions of things. Children and young people can absolutely be involved in those spaces, but it needs to be done in the correct way. Children and young people should not be expected to just adapt their lives around that, no matter how important it might be to them.
On the point about the toll of social media and its impact on gender-based violence, that issue was a big part of the debate in the sitting that Ellie Craig and I took part in, which formed the motion that was presented as part of the 16 days of activism. We take an intersectional approach to gender-based violence, and we advocate that everyone else does, too. Everyone experiences that issue in a different way. Although women might be more affected, no matter what the conceptions are around the subject, it involves issues such as toxic masculinity and the things that are said by Andrew Tate and other such people online. Therefore, there needs to be an intersectional approach, because the issue affects different communities differently.
I will continue Keith Brown’s initial line of questioning. I think that I was the first MSYP to be on a local council education committee, but I did not have voting rights, despite having roughly the same mandate in terms of votes as the councillors did.
I am interested in what you said about education reform. I share a lot of your frustrations about the process, particularly the fact that the Government is, in essence, not taking forward Professor Hayward’s recommendations, which is a massive missed opportunity. Much of the reform cannot be put into law—a lot of it cannot be put in primary legislation, although some of it can be done by regulation—because a lot of it is a matter of policy choice.
However, one issue that has some relation to the Education (Scotland) Bill is, as has been touched on, how to engage with young people who are not already involved or are not naturally interested. I am talking about young people who do not become MSYPs—I think that I can say that as somebody who was one. I am interested in your thoughts on that kind of engagement. The bill sets out proposals to have a learner interest committee and to have someone representing the interests of young people on the board—I agree with Ellie Craig that that must be a young person, not an adult speaking on their behalf. However, that is a very small and, ultimately, self-selecting group.
We can take the example of higher history, on which we are about to take evidence. The SQA has no mechanism by which to contact every young person who sat the higher history exam last year. Particularly through the reform process, how can we create a system in which we get mass engagement with all young people who are affected by such decisions, not just a self-selecting group? We need that group, but those people are not necessarily always representative.
I totally agree. As an organisation, we have gone through a really good process of engagement with young people more widely. From 2020 to 2022, we delivered the SQA learner panel model, which was then developed into an SQA advisory project. That group of MSYPs had the sort of active role that you are talking about, as they might have sat on a committee or engaged with SQA senior management. A big part of that involved the MSYPs going to different schools and communities across Scotland and, as young people themselves, holding focus groups in order to reach young people who might not want to be involved in the Youth Parliament or something like that. That project ended in August 2024.
There is a bit of a gap just now, but, when we introduce the new body and the new structures, we would be really keen to see a model like that, because, as you said, not all young people will yet have the skills and experience that they need to be involved at a higher level.
11:00
I mentioned the independent review group with Louise Hayward. One of the things that we did really well was engaging with different demographics in society. I do not know how aware you all are of the final report and everything to do with the review, but, to provide a bit of context, we ran community collaborative groups. The independent review itself was made up of a group of individuals who each represented different sectors of society, whether that was universities, employers, big business, or students like me and young people. Those individuals would go out alongside the Scottish Government secretariat and run workshops and community collaborative groups in different areas across Scotland. For example, with the help of the Scottish Youth Parliament and the Scottish Government, I chaired three of those meetings.
The review itself was not a forever process, in the way that we are thinking about for qualifications Scotland. We met students from all over the country. The Scottish Government came into my school and number of other schools around the country, and we spoke with students, teachers and people on the ground. We set up lunch-time and after-school workshops, where we would sit down with folk and have really honest conversations about what is happening with education. Obviously, if the students were talking, the teachers were out of the room. It is about creating a safe space for young people to have their voices heard, giving them a platform and meeting them where they are. The IRG did that really successfully—meeting people where they were and travelling to different schools.
No one method works for everyone. As we said earlier, surveys are great for some people, but, for example, I hate filling in surveys and I would rather sit here and talk to you about something. It is about incorporating a number of ways to engage with young people, through running workshops and going into communities, doing surveys and having a system for engaging in various ways. I cannot give you one perfect magic bullet, but I can suggest things that we have done in the past that have been really successful, such as the community collaborative groups.
On what Ellie Grant said, the SQA advisory panel project was very successful, but, if we are doing engagement work on that in the future, which we hope to do—we hope to be able to form something like that again—the topics for discussion should be selected by young people. That was an issue this time, because young people would tell us about specific things—for example, we heard about exam reform a lot—but we had other topics that we needed to discuss that did not feel as pertinent to the young people.
Were the other topics things that the SQA senior management had asked you to discuss with young people?
Yes.
That is good to know. Thank you.
Thank you very much. That concludes our evidence session. We have significantly gone over our allocated time, so thank you for your patience. However, that shows the level of interest from members and the fact that you have given comprehensive answers on a number of issues. Beinn Grant, I cannot give you a guarantee, but the impression that the committee had was that we could come back to this subject, perhaps annually. This is the first time that the committee has decided to do have such an evidence session, but the evidence that you have given us today has been very helpful not just in relation to what the Parliament is looking at at the moment, but on some of the issues that we should consider in the future.
I thank you all for your time as MSYPs and for the extra roles that you have taken on in the organisation, and for coming here today.
I will suspend the meeting for about 10 minutes.
11:03 Meeting suspended.Air ais
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“Higher History Review 2024”