Seòmar agus comataidhean

Oh, mon ami—okay.

At the end of last year, there were a number of different reports about the provision of language courses at the University of Aberdeen. I also met the principal to discuss that very subject towards the end of last year—I should say that it is a matter for the university, which is independent of Government—and I understand that the issue is one of footfall: the university does not have the numbers to drive the availability of courses.

Nevertheless, I accept that there is a challenge around languages. I have asked to engage with Education Scotland on the point, and I met officials last week to look again at our languages policy and how we are supporting it. We have done a lot of work in our primary schools on the one-plus-two model to support the delivery of language learning, with our young people learning two languages, and I think that we could look to support more in that space.

Liam Kerr’s substantive point goes back to Ruth Maguire’s point about whether we should prescribe in the curriculum that language learning should happen until the end of S4. That is not in our current curriculum. If that is a view that Mr Kerr would like to explore with me when it comes to qualifications reform, I will be happy to hear it.

Both Liam Kerr and I have a qualification in languages. I have found mine very helpful in conversing with Mairi Gougeon’s husband, who is from France. However, in seriousness, having a second language is helpful, including with a person’s development. A friend of mine who is a former German teacher spoke to me recently about the joy of learning languages.

We need to be mindful of some changes to curriculum for excellence. Going back to Mr Rennie’s question about what is wrong with Scottish education, we need to consider the link between the BGE and the senior phase but also the role of subjects. In secondary schools, subject specialists with degrees and teaching qualifications to deliver them need to be part of the solution. We need to be mindful of changes to CFE that might drive changes in the uptake of courses, whereby we will have less language learning than we had in the past.

When Liam Kerr and I were at school—although, obviously, he is older than I am—we had to study a language until the end of S4. Probably all of us in this room—maybe not Ross Greer—have an S4 qualification in a language, but the generations who followed us may not, because they were not compelled to learn a language by their curriculum, which was flexible.

The counter-argument to that is that we should prescribe. Such a curriculum would be very different from the one that we currently have. However, if the committee holds that view, I am happy to hear it. Obviously, we will have a wider debate about qualifications in the next few weeks.

No, it is not. The curriculum improvement work that I committed to in December is starting now. We are already getting going with the maths element of curriculum improvement. I expect to have recommendations with me towards the middle of the year and we will go out and test those with the profession in October. That must be part of informing improvement.

The fact that I have delayed one aspect of reform, the legislation for the new bodies, does not mean that we cannot get going on curriculum improvement. To speak bluntly, given the PISA results at the end of last year, we have to do that.

Yes.

I look forward to hearing them.

I have certainly heard evidence to that end. Sometimes, authorities take a monolithic, one-size-fits-all approach to their area. That can be really disempowering for headteachers. It can also mean that headteachers and middle leaders in schools—as I experienced in a previous life—can be disempowered in things such as the recruitment process, so they do not have the ability to appoint a member of staff to their team. Those are the key decisions that you would expect middle leaders and headteachers to have control over. However, when local authorities view teachers as numbers that can be moved around from school to school, they are not always thinking about what is best for the leadership in that school, for the teachers’ professional development or for the young people.

We have resources at a national level and we have the headteachers charter, but the answer to Michelle Thomson’s substantive point must come from the new relationship with local government in the Verity house agreement, and it must be about encouraging a spirit of empowerment across the country rather than only in pockets. We know that, where empowerment does happen, it works well, staff feel valued and outcomes improve.

It is broadly—

From memory, it came from a mixture of the two. I may bring in Stuart Greig on the specifics of that, but it is not a clear-cut split, if that is the point of the question.

That is a very good question, if I may say so, Ms Duncan-Glancy.

Earlier today, we talked about the pay dispute. The committee knows pretty well how that frayed relationships between Government, the teaching unions and the profession. I have been trying to make things a bit better in the past eight months, but we will have to work differently and work together. The professional associations want to be part of the solution to educational reform.

Ms Duncan-Glancy talks about bottom-up decision making, which I suppose speaks to some of the challenges that I rehearsed in my response to Ms Thomson. Decisions can be taken for people in education that leave them feeling disempowered by the process.

Headteachers have a degree of flexibility, but they can exercise that only if they are empowered to do so by their local authorities. For example, a local authority might make a decision about closing a building and, although a headteacher might have carried out a risk assessment and be happy to have the building open, they might be overruled by their local authority. Those things are demoralising and can be quite challenging for leaders in schools.

On the subject of things being taken out of classroom teachers’ control, it would be helpful to hear a little more from Ms Duncan-Glancy. Certain things are taken out of a classroom teacher’s control. They might not have control of their timetable or of the classes that present in front of them. I am speaking as a secondary school specialist, but primary teachers will talk about the year group that they might be planning for. Some of those things are not in their gift.

If Ms Duncan-Glancy has ideas about how we can build that into the reform agenda, I would be happy to hear them. To some extent, the empowerment agenda was a creation of the previous Parliament and we must not forget about that work, because it has to support education reform in the here and now. Returning to that work to refresh people’s understanding, particularly local authorities’ understanding, would be helpful.

On the point about the teaching workforce, we resolved the pay dispute but we did not talk about the other challenges that the profession faces. That speaks to the challenges that Ms Duncan-Glancy has illustrated, whether in regard to workload, additional support needs or behaviour, which I am sure we will come on to talk about this afternoon, if not now. We need to resolve that relationship around conditions, and I do not think that where we got to last year did that.

I am happy to ask the DFM to respond. She has lead responsibility. However, that is the public commitment at the current time. On Willie Rennie’s point, she is leading on feedback about the timescales. We will take that point away as an action from today’s committee meeting.

I would like to hear your ideas first, Mr Rennie, before I pre-empt my response.