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Education and Skills Committee 08 May 2019

08 May 2019 · S5 · Education and Skills Committee

Item of business

Subject Choices Inquiry

Larry Flanagan Watch on SPTV

As far as the senior phase is concerned, significant subject choice is supposed to happen in S3. However, that is not the reality. The majority of schools still do subject choice in S2, which means that they are still leaning towards standard grade post-16 qualifications instead of thinking about broad general education in the senior phase. At the point where subject choice is supposed to happen, there is supposed to be an S3 profile. That area was hugely contested when CFE was being developed; in fact, some people had never heard of it. However, it is supposed to set out a three-year pathway for a young person at age 15, whether or not that young person is leaving school; in other words, schools are responsible for having a pathway for young people up to the age of 18. A young person who leaves school at 16 might well be out of school in fourth year and be doing college courses instead, but they must still have a pathway through to 18 that is predicated on the idea of a positive destination. I understand your point, though, and I have to say that there is still a debate around national 4 and whether there should be an external qualification in that respect. However, the fact is that, for a lot of the young people who leave, that qualification will not necessarily best suit their career intentions. Many of the courses that are offered in colleges are SQA courses and, as a result, do not have external qualifications; they are internally validated by the college and then that college validation process is moderated by the SQA. I would also point out that there is no external exam for apprenticeships. What might be the best pathway for a young person leaving school at 16 should not have an external examination artificially attached to it. That is not to say that there is no debate around N4—the issue has simply been parked for the past 18 months. Opinion among our members is divided, with a lot of people thinking that an external exam would give N4 added validity in the eyes of parents and pupils. I certainly think that N4 must have at least two pass levels; a minimal pass, which is the current arrangement, is general grade 4, whereas before we had general grade 3 and general grade 4, which were quite different. If you had grade 4, you did an int 1, whereas if you had grade 3, you did an int 2. However, a threshold pass in N4 is not a good preparation for N5, and we have been arguing that there should be at least bi-level validation at N4. There is still a debate over whether that should be an external exam or some kind of external validation of an internal process, but I think that we have to take that forward. What I would guard against is the idea that the pathway for all young people should be N4 or equivalent, N5 or equivalent, higher and then advanced higher. We support, for the majority of pupils, the idea of schools focusing on exit qualifications and working towards ensuring that there are depth and breadth around them. However, that cannot be universal, because a lot of young people will benefit from step-by-step approaches around qualifications. There has to be some flexibility. Our challenge at the moment is that there is, for different reasons, a whole range of practice across the system and a reluctance to impose a pattern on schools, as that would seem to be taking the decision out of their hands. However, some clearer direction needs to be given, because schools have, by and large, been attached to the qualifications pathway model, and there has been no drive from anyone to move them away from that. Up until its recent reboot, Education Scotland shied away from the question; for the five years in which it was introducing these new qualifications, you could not get Education Scotland to say, “You should think about bypassing.” It just let the system run as it had done, and that is one of the reasons why we are at this crossroads. We have to think about how we move forward, but I do not think that we will do that by moving back to previous standard grade practice, despite the fact that it has probably been our most successful qualification in the past 40 years.

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Education and Skills Committee 08 May 2019

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