Meeting of the Parliament 15 June 2017
I welcome Liz Smith’s comments about empowering schools and headteachers. I believe that that is the right step to take to ensure that decisions about the education of our young people can be taken by those whom we trust to lead the education process and who have the greatest opportunity to effect the approach.
I will deal with the three specific points that Liz Smith raises in order. First, pupil equity funding has already made a huge impact on Scottish education by giving headteachers the flexibility to address the needs of young people in their care. They will do that along with schools and communities, because headteachers who act wisely will engage them in determining how best to proceed with pupil equity funding.
In the reforms that I am making, I am trying to strike a balance between providing schools with the autonomy to make the decisions that matter to young people and providing the support to enable headteachers to make wise decisions. Any guidelines that are available on PEF must be supportive and advisory; they cannot be the type of restrictive instrument that prevents headteachers from exercising sensible educational judgment about how the money should be distributed. From my conversations with headteachers, I know that they value guidance on how to utilise those resources but value equally having the freedom to spend the resources in a fashion that they can justify educationally.
Secondly, I recognise that the issue relating to Education Scotland has been debated extensively in Parliament. Indeed, I considered the question substantially in the debate that we had on the subject some months ago. If we were to separate the inspection and improvement functions, with leadership of those functions being held separately in our education system, we would be requiring schools to work out whether they should follow the signals of the inspectorate or those of the improvement organisations. Inspection is all about being part of the improvement function in education—that is our vision for inspection, which is a contributory factor in the design of improvement mechanisms in education.
Thirdly, regional collaboratives are what I say they are: mandatory collaborations between local authorities and Education Scotland that will enable us to pool our combined resources in order for them to have more effect in improving education in individual schools. Why is that important? It is important because not all schools can currently rely on a strong, specialist and effective improvement function being available in their part of the country, and that is not good enough. Every school in our country must be able to rely on such a resource. Through joint working between local authorities, Education Scotland and experienced educationalists, we intend to create regional education collaboratives that will fulfil that purpose.